skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting petition, and I agree with it; but I wonder why are all projects mentioned in the _Signed by_ section based on JavaScript? I know there are other languages involved in some of those projects like C++ and Java in Selenium and PhantomJS but this specific thing in the document makes me believe that only JavaScript developers _(at least the ones using GitHub)_ are more prone to complain than other type of developers.
i always expect these senior intelligence guys to have the most disciplined security around (like snowden).

When you're powerful (or rich) enough to be on the winning side of the political and justice systems, your independent and individual security is much less of a priority. The system will take care of you.

Scooter Libby was disbarred. Edward Snowden is stuck in Russia.
True, but thanks to the API and their relatively simple structure it's reasonably easy to at least copy their contents as well. Linking them correctly to user accounts on a new platform is probably the biggest issue.
I'm completely comfortable calling BitBucket's UI/UX terrible.
This is cool, but might actually decrease attendance. I've been in some IMAX seats I definitely would not have bought if I'd known how acute the screen angle would be.

I wonder if theaters will be interested.
Last time realized that basic algebra (equivalence relation and classes) were helping me to solve a concrete programming problem I was having (having something to do with syntactic trees). It was a big surprise to me. Equivalence relations are a simple concept [0], and maybe my problem could have been solved without thinking of it, but still, some fundamental math helped me for my problem, and I was stunned by that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_relation
This is Mike Hearn.

http://plan99.net/~mike/
In general you're right, but this story was guaranteed not to lack for upvotes. Indeed it went to #1 as soon as we buried the other one as a dupe.

I realize it's not a big deal, and it's actually a great sign about the HN community that almost no one cares much about karma. But we do want to try harder to give the original submitter credit, because then the incentive is aligned with what's best for the community: finding good stories that haven't been posted yet.
A catchy name, with fewer syllables, or fun acronym has some value does it not?
Yes when I want a car I buy one (i.e. pay for it to be made). The OP is suggesting that film studios operate the same model.

Personally I disagree, I don't think the current model is so broken that it can't be fixed. Although some things about it are just plain dumb. The primary part that is almost comical in this case is the bit where content owners refuse to make the extra money that they could so easily make by selling/renting to the millions of people that want to pay them and instead spend a fortune on "public relations" and copyright trolling.
Maybe they were referring to something along the lines of this? (Note: I have not seen the study referenced in my linked article, and cannot vouch for the accuracy of Flux's statement)

http://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light-has...

"But we do know that exposure to light suppresses the secretion of melatonin, a hormone that influences circadian rhythms, and there’s some experimental evidence (it’s very preliminary) that lower melatonin levels might explain the association with cancer."
I completely agree with some of these suggestions, but it doesn't need all of them. If you really need a heavily-customizable issue tracking system, you can do anything you want in Bugzilla or Jira.

Every checkbox, dropdown and mandatory field they add makes GitHub Issues less attractive to those who don't need it. Simplicity is a feature, and it's one that you sacrifice as you make your software more flexible.
Well, I was mostly arguing the point that there wasn't strong leadership or roadmap. Disagreeing with the leadership doesn't mean it isn't strong :)

FWIW what you describe is pretty much the definition of a soft fork though - disallowing previously allowed transactions. Old nodes can't fully validate the new transaction types, but they can't spend them either, so they aren't really at risk.

Also, the discussion was about Bitcoin Core, not Blockstream, and the Lightning Network is not on the Core roadmap page. Though from reading the lightning network whitepaper at https://lightning.network/ I don't see anything inherently wrong with it.
You should definitely add Anonymous Pro to the list! http://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/anonymous-pro
Oristand – A New Kind of Stand Up Desk
No, nobody is "entitled" to access to content.
Why should maintainers not get annoyed if people ignore the proper support channels (which often have a great community of users to help) and further burden the developers instead?
If memory serves, f.lux was banned for the "private" API's they used, which was necessary to control the the screen warmth.

So now that Apple has released their own screen dimming app, is Apple's implementation any different than flux's? Or did Apple effectively just abuse their app policy so that they could proactively kill a competitor to their "new" feature?
Good read.
Here is what will happen (my guess): as Bitcoin usage continues to grow, the limited capacity will start to hurt over the coming months, with the planned "segregated witness" proposal not helping much. Also, the block reward will be cut in half this summer to 12.5 Bitcoins per block, driving many miners out of business and reminding the rest that they could earn more with larger blocks. Furthermore, some of the affected companies (e.g. Coinbase) will announce rewards for larger blocks mined (e.g. 1 Bitcoin reward for each block above 1MB for the next 1000 blocks), making the first miners jump to the new protocol (the much feared hard fork), with the others following soon after the most popular exchanges announce that they will not accept "old branch" coins.
Author here: The sourceforge website hasn't been updated in years, and yes it used to launch demos in the browser, but most people don't have Java in the browser these days. The github page is more recent.
I agree that that's probably how it started, but it seems that once the cultural expectation has been set, it's hard for a single project maintainer to set a different custom just for their own project. People are going to use the conventions and communication methods that they learn elsewhere, even if you say not to in the contributing guidelines document. You might be able to get individuals to stop doing it in your project by asking them directly, but then each person has done it at least once, and you've had to ask each person to change their normal habits.
Besides, as they note in the letter, there is a valid and valuable purpose to these communications, it would just be better if they were in a different place than clogging up the comment thread.
Playing devil's advocate - in their respective heydays, SourceForge and Google Code both seeemed unassailable. They had large, active communities that hosted the most popular OSS projects.

Could the same thing happen to GitHub?
And that entitles you to just take it? Again, why should anyone pay you for the work you do if that's what you believe?
> Since when does one being able to talk about yesterday's Game of Thrones episode become some kind of divine "cultural right"?

More like I want to pay to watch today's Game of Thrones and I don't see why I'm not able to do so.
Although Apple are perfectly within their rights to do what they've done I hope they'd reach out to the f.lux authors and do something for them. It's not like they're destroying a business - f.lux being free - but it would reward the authors for proving the value of the improvement to the platform. You want to encourage developers like that. And it's not like Apple are short of cash.
I was specifically referring to Switzerland and Italy.
Irrelevant. We're talking about people who feel entitled to the work of others just taking it.
Hi I'm the author, and I find it surprising that this has received 60 upvotes, but 0 comments.

I had fun creating this, and might make similar visualizations in the future. If you have feedback or requests, I would welcome it. I give you permission to disregard HN's policy on 'gratuitous negativity' as much as I have the authority to.
Microsoft Drops Prices for Some Azure Instances by Up to 17%
Look at kallithea SCM at http://kallithea-scm.org/, we have used it and in most cases it works well. Also it supports both git and mercurial. Python should learn a lesson when they decided to move their repository to closed source system like github. But obviously as people use Facebook, developers use github for the same reason, network effect.
Indeed... cameras need to be maintained when they are broken, the video quality of cameras is not really good for space reason so the footage is not usable all the time, the videos need to be stored somewhere with a good backup system and must obey local laws about data retention, different cameras are managed by different people so you need some paperwork to access everything which might be needed, they need to be checked regularly to see if they still work fine... Putting all of this in place is not really cheap and easy to maintain all the time, that's why not everything works 100% of the time.
I agree with voting.

I also think that voting systems should only have /positive/ inputs. (I agree with the content of a given statement/post). Negatives belong as a concretely expressed /contrasting opinion/ which can, it's self, be 'agreed with' (voted for).
Have you ever tried to maintain a popular OS project on Github? Github issues feel great until you start using them at scale, and then they start to fall apart without some structure. This is especially pronounced in open source where many issues come from people who aren't familiar with what information you need in an issue to quickly resolve it.

I don't think the authors are requesting that this be made mandatory for all repos, but instead they just want the option to set up rules for repos they maintain. As someone giving up their free time to offer software for the rest of us, it seems only fair to let them set the rules about what they need before they can resolve an issue.

The biggest issue I see OSS maintainers running into is that they likely aren't the voice that Github listens to most anymore. If they can get some companies that pay for Github Enterprise to sign their letter as well that would likely help prioritize these features.
There's a similar, more flexible, open source app you can sideload via Xcode here: https://github.com/anthonya1999/GoodNight . I use it on my non-jailbroken iPhone and iPad. Does the trick for me (all orange, all the time).
[CEO FUN-FACTS] Featuring Tomer Bar-Zeev, Co-Founder and CEO of IronSource
It may not have been so malicious.

"Huh, how is f.lux doing that? The API looks like it's private."
Show HN: Fosite – OAuth2 framework for Go
The issues were deleted in fairly short order, but their notifications were still sent out to all repository watchers and persisted beyond the issue deletion. Also, most issues were generated mere seconds apart from accounts less than a day old.

So the issue isn't that GitHub didn't let them clean up the issues after the fact, but that there were no a) rate limiting options, b) user reputation options, or c) issue submission filtering options.

Any one of those three would have reduced the impact significantly.
Except what would f.lux add on top of what Apple has released? It seems like Apple already did all the work.
+1 to the notification spam. Being @sam on github sucks sometimes. And as far as I can figure out there's no way to set watching/following/notifications to opt-in only.

So every time someone who knows a "Sam" uses @sam incorrectly in an issue I get notified, have to unsubscribe, ignore, and leave a polite message to let them know they're doing it wrong.

It's really lame that they've never fixed this.
It's there, near the bottom. You have to keep clicking the down arrow at the bottom of the page to load more posts.
I think this is really cool but why not use SSH keys instead of passwords?
> Further, there'd be nothing to stop you from violating the terms of any contract or even murdering anyone--you'd have unlimited rights.

There being nothing to stop you doesn't mean it's not a violation of an inalienable right or that I didn't have that right to begin with. The widely held belief is that freedom from murder is a right regardless of whether or not an institution is established to protect it. I believe it follows directly from our ability for higher order abstract thought, particularly our ability to empathize with others. So in some respects, you might say that our ability to empathize is what creates inalienable rights in the first place.
It doesn't matter if the implementation is the same. Apple has access to API's that the rest of us don't and it's not so they can have more power than us. They can't be expected to make public API's for everything and maintain them for every release. Not to mention I'm sure Apple has been working on this for a while. The whole f.lux thing didn't occur too long ago.
Comparing these issues above to justify why you should be able to watch Game of Thrones for free ins't a very good argument.
Don't forget the amount of money we've spent attempting to militarily stabilize the Middle East. If those countries didn't have oil we wouldn't care about them nearly as much.
How to Deal with the Requirements Documentation
I noticed that most of the signers are maintaning JS/HTML projects too.

I wonder if those types of projects are more likely to have these problems (larger userbase? Less experienced userbase? just different userbase?)? It could also just be a coincidence that they knew each other because they work on similar things, and a group of people who knew each other are the ones who wrote the letter.
For objective c on osx generally "private" means: we didn't put it in the header file, but you can obviously dump out that information and glean what functions do what.

Then because objective c function calls are just message passing, you can send that off.

It is no real different than C in this regard, private means just that it isn't publicly exported. It also generally means it could go away or change with an os update. So they tend to break often as they're generally ending up as public apis that apple doesn't yet want to commit to.

To block things from using the api means you would be checking every call site invocation. Not really possible with the message passing style of objective c.

Even if it is running as a user you would have to do something like:
function () {
if !allowed_uid()
dunno segfault
else
ok cool do things
}

That whole process would use up needless energy or ram which on a mobile why bother, just tell people to stop using private apis and kick them out if they do.
I still check in because it's a great way to keep a running diary of places I've been.

I've been a user since 2009 and it's amazing to be able to go back 4 years and see what the awesome ramen place was in the LES I went to with XYZ.
Completely agree. A friend and I tried to do something like this as a fun project at a hackathon, getting to 80% wasn't difficult, just a lot of parsing the DOM for articles. Dealing with things like adverts, photo captions, comments, and other text that shouldn't be in the actual article was the real pain -- especially when we wanted to detect paragraph/subheader breaks since we wanted to parse articles and text-to-speech.
This looks good if you're using a laptop. Unfortunately this doesn't work as well for people with a large monitor or dual monitor setup.
Here is a user-friendly script that will disable UseRoaming on your os x computer. If you want to send this out to your coworkers, remind them that they have to right-click and choose open to execute a .command script (unless they have "allow apps downloaded from anywhere" enabled)

https://gist.github.com/logicalmethods/49f42190406667cbbbee
> What would you say about a municipality where half the circulating police-cars were secretly fakes "to deter crime", and which would not respond to any emergency?

That'd probably depend on a) whether or not they're deterring crime and b) whether or not the overall response time is reasonable.
AT&T. Doing it with gmail wouldn't solve the problem I have that causes me to want to send SMS messages in the first place, so that's out.
Over very long time periods, we may see progress here, but inertia is huge. Take Parasolid. It's a very good kernel. Between it, Granite and the Dassault kernel, we have most of the world's geometry being handled on those kernels. Probably billions of man hours at this point.

Interoperability is basically terrible.

If it were me, I would see efforts to interoperable and infer intent, features, etc... as the most productive task. Those kernels aren't going anywhere, nor are the geometry use cases getting easier.

A refactoring of all that is a very seriously expensive, time consuming task and still that body of data, intent, automation, etc... is there to deal with.

It's hard to even think about an economically viable case.

There are some trying with primitive, open kernels, and various takes on forks of the established ones.

One vendor is dividing the kernel into well defined pieces do that other software can operate in those gaps and do so efficiently.
More than that, they were distributing an Xcode project that was little more than a binary, using the recent changes to developer code signing in Xcode to get that binary on to user devices. I can see how that alone would provoke a reaction from Apple, private APIs or not.

After all, there are plenty of open source projects on Github that merely use private APIs, the browser for tvOS[0] for example.

[0] https://github.com/steventroughtonsmith/tvOSBrowser
This, right here, is why I abandoned the Apple ecosystem. When a company has the kind of control that Apple has with the app store, they will inevitably abuse it.
Pryvit – A Protocol to Balance Privacy/Public Safety Needs
The more times you do it, the _lower_ is the chance that you end up in a crappy job. If the job doesn't meet your needs, move. I'm not saying money is everything and it should be the only thing to optimize for. I'm just saying there's no shame in demanding more money if you can. As a bonus, awesomeness of "individual contributor" type jobs is well correlated with how much you get paid. Companies are typically interested in putting expensive folks on the meatiest problems.
It's not the first time apple is acting in such an unfavorable way towards inventors/developers.
It was exactly the same story regarding the use of the voluem button for taking pictures. 1st banned by apple and the later on integrated by apple. Not the best attitude imho.
They might be interested in Code for America's Brigade groups, which are civic technology volunteer groups that meet regularly in many cities (including outside the US): https://www.codeforamerica.org/brigade/
Migrating to DynamoDB: Lessons in Schema Design
> I understand that there isn't a single solution that exactly matches what Github has, and that maintaining your own git server + git management/issues/etc.. app is a pain

You outlined exactly why people don't build their own or use another system. Github is the best there is. That doesn't mean it doesn't have problems, but if your company/project/expertise isn't focused in collaborative development and/or version control, you're just distracting yourself by building your own.

The authors are not saying "we can build a better Github." They have complaints and would like them resolved, but don't see a good way of having that happen.
This free clone of the fixedsys is just pixelisiuosly crisp and DOS'y:
http://www.fixedsysexcelsior.com/
Yes but then we only find what we've been taught to see for the sake of institutional structure and wonder why life isn't more inspiring.
Start with a Minimum Viable Process
and they can re-price existing options as well.
Although this is reasonable its upsetting, I hope in time lxc software get less fragmented.. Docker really should have just gone with CNI.
Diridon to SJSU is straight down Santa Clara St. I'm missing something with that example. That stretch of Santa Clara is more walkable than before 280 existed... if you wanted to walk it then.
"This means that that if bitcoin, or other related technologies like the block chain are going to be adopted by companies to run real businesses on then either the companies themselves will own the technology roadmap or some other entity with a fair bit of credibility will have to step in."

Like banks and the Fed?
I use f.lux on my Mac and it has made a real difference in my sleep. On my iPad when I am reading late I use the inverted colors mode which can be triggered by pressing three times on the home button (if you activate the shortcut). I would say this is even more a relief for the eyes, as not only blue colors become warm but all the white that is the background color for most everything becomes just dark. Of course you can't watch movies in these conditions but I highly recommend this for readers.
They showed the same attitude in https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/2112.

Continued insistence on that attitude virtually guarantees that they will lose out through refusal to solve problems that people actually have.
It's not documented or in the public headers. Meaning you do have to do a bit of fiddling in your app, but that just amounts to using reflection to use the API.

Just because an API is private doesn't mean it's privileged. Indeed, many once private APIs have later become public. Apple does scan the binaries that are uploaded for private API use, effectively banning them from the store.

One of the main reasons for banning use of private APIs is that those are usually in flux. They're not release worthy, and the last thing any platform maker, be they Apple, Google, or Microsoft, wants, is for a private change to break a bunch of 3rd party apps. These private APIs might also be doing things that they don't want just anyone to be able to do.
Automakers Go Electric, Even If Gas Is Cheap
I know. Not trying to be snarky at all. Why don't people call stuff by it's names??? Transpiling, not compiling.

Maybe it looks like I'm nitpicking... If it got across like that, sorry. Not my intention at all.
The BBC seems to be managing to do just that quite well. Their IPlayer is quite hard to access from outside of Great Britain.

If Netflix will actually do this, then it will be impossible to use Netflix with the majority of commercial VPN providers.

(Netflix will lose me as a customer as well.)
They are usually undocumented/internal calls, not necessarily privileged.

They can't be blocked that easily because the public APIs will necessarily call the private APIs at some point internally in order to implement their functionality.

The main reason private API calls are not allowed by Apple is that it would introduce a lot of app breakage when updating iOS versions. Either that or Apple would need to manually add hacks to account for specific apps that are misbehaved. (What Microsoft usually does for important/popular apps)

Security-sensitive calls do require special permissions from the Operating System, which is usually granted on a process-per-process basis. (Which is why we only got JIT compilation in WebViews recently, once the WebView process was separated from the App process thanks to WebKit2)

During the review phase of the App Store submission, Apple will use static analysis tools to figure out if the App is calling the private APIs. Some people have successfully used dynamic execution techniques to game that, to some extent. F.lux attempted to bypass the review issue entirely by shipping their app as an Xcode project, so you could manually compile it and install on your iOS device, but got a Cease and Desist from Apple IIRC.

I've read somewhere that Apple has started to take extra measures to further disallow calling private APIs starting on 9.3, but I'm not sure on the details.