skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wrote Issues, so I've likely thought through these problems more than anyone else.

I really disagree with the general sentiment of this post, and very much agree with the original "Dear GitHub" letter. The product needs a lot of work, and that I couldn't address these problems while I was there really, deeply depresses me.

Issues hasn't been touched since I shipped the third large iteration a year and a half ago. It was never intended to be a finished product at that point; it was intended to evolve quite a bit from that initial vision. There's a lot of pain that open source developers and private source developers face today, and I really hope we all can start seeing that pain in our community eased soon.
You cannot simply out-vote the Chinese miners on the issue of the so-called protocol: you need to convince the Bitcoin "economic majority" to accept a change to the codebase that everyone uses to verify the blockchain, otherwise you're effectively mining a very expensive altcoin which no merchants or exchanges accept. (An altcoin is a cryptocurrency that generally captures every feature of Bitcoin except being called Bitcoin.)

The economic majority on Bitcoin has basically said "We're terrified of what happens if we de-throne Bitcoin Core, which is the lineal descendant of the Satoshi client. Accordingly, we'll go along with whatever that project decides." The problems with Bitcoin Core's decisionmaking process are in the post. Worth noting, since I don't recall seeing it: Bitcoin Core is operated by "consensus" with respect to this issue and any of five devs can blackball a change; three of the devs work for a company whose economic justification for existing is "the Bitcoin network is inadequate to do the things that many users want Bitcoin to do." Fixing Bitcoin Core would harm their economic interests at the new company they founded.

Why be terrified of de-throning Bitcoin Core? Isn't it a protocol with multiple competing implementations? NO, because the "Bitcoin protocol" does not exist -- Bitcoin is a network of nodes running one C++ codebase and that is essentially the entire ballgame. Bitcoin's requirement for distributed consensus means that if you are not bug-for-bug compatible with Bitcoin Core, which runs a supermajority of the network, you risk being catastrophically forked from the network at any time of an attacker's choosing.

Also, the scenario where some economic players remain on Bitcoin Core and some economic players migrate to Bitcoin Better, followed by a hard fork (irreconcilable split of the blockchains regarded as authoritative by these two incompatible software ecosystems), results in loss of the global non-technical consensus in what a "Bitcoin" actually is. You'll find that your "Bitcoins" might not be actually useable at a merchant who accepts "Bitcoins." You might find a payment made to you in "Bitcoins", which your wallet says happened, has not actually happened according to your payment processor. Cats and dogs living together; catastrophe happens; the price of Bitcoin Core coins and Bitcoin Better coins both approaches the natural value of Bitcoin, which is zero.
1. I would agree but this doesn't reflect the reality and underlying political reasons for regulation and enforcement. I would imagine the large fine (lol jk, a $7mm fine is a joke) was to send a message that stonewalling a public regulator is not acceptable. Maybe "unrelated," but as this is a discussion, I do find it ironic that the tech community hates Comcast and wants the infrastructure to be treated like utilities, and then is okay with their own golden child (uber) running all over a public utility... When they were trying to enforce antidoscrimination measures. The reason Uber can do this is the same reason Comcast can hold everything hostage (yes I know that's very simplified, I'm on my phone). The fine is very trivial compared to the damage discrimination has done to this country - it must be known that that is totally unacceptable.

2. Fair

3. I disagree. I think looking at the ethics of companies who have historically picked fights with CPUC is quite telling, and cited an example.
It's basically (the older Samsung models) a Stingray detector, plus will shut down the device if activity is detected in the baseband CPU while the application CPU is dormant meaning shenanigans like SMS 'stealth' spamming is going on or evil OTA update.

You can always walk around with a portable hotspot and leave the phone on airplane mode. Only use textsecure/signal and download a free software reversed clone of Google services app to use GCM. If going to all this trouble to avoid targeted spying probably easier to just buy a chromebook with RockChip instead and use OTR or Signal whenever it comes out with desktop client (if not already, I haven't kept up with their current status of porting).
Am I wrong? I don't think I am. If I were a f.lux developer, given the reality that f.lux will almost certainly never be allowed to distribute on the iOS App Store, I'd be happy that Apple decided the functionality was useful enough to put into the OS. It's not like they're charging money for f.lux anyway, so there's no lost revenue here.
Yes there are several other cryptocurrencies that (at least attempt to) address this issue. Those solutions were disregarded as non-essential technical improvements, and any change to Bitcoin would bring instability. Now perhaps more people will see those as fundamentals to the currencies' goal.

You can see here many alternative coins and an estimated market cap:

http://coinmarketcap.com/

A lot of altcoins came up as mere clones of another, pump-and-dump schemes, or with irrelevant or plain bad changes; but there were quite a few valid innovations. Bitcoin has barely changed in it's core protocol. I hope other projects get more exposure in the future (or Bitcoin becomes less afraid of change).

"You can't possibly get a good technology going without an enormous number of failures. It's a universal rule. If you look at bicycles, there were thousands of weird models built and tried before they found the one that really worked. You could never design a bicycle theoretically. Even now, after we've been building them for 100 years, it's very difficult to understand just why a bicycle works – it's even difficult to formulate it as a mathematical problem. But just by trial and error, we found out how to do it, and the error was essential." -- Freeman Dyson
Open source surely benefits the majority of GitHub’s paying customers. So the way I see it, if this improves how open source projects are run, that will result in better libraries and tools for GitHub’s paying customers.
The Happiness Code: Cold, hard rationality
I think Netflix is not to blame here but the license holders. Just more evidence IP law is behind the times.
jQuery is great and conceptually quite simple - select an element of your page and do something to it in a line or two. It's a shame that the React/Angular stuff doesn't have that kind of simplicity. I'm not sure if that's inherent to the problems they deal with or not.
I must assume I'm wrong in this calculation but 40 watts seems pretty cheap in cost. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=40+watts+in+kwh+per+mon... at a 3.3 cents per kWh rate is just under a $1 per month right? On the top tier of my local utility it would still be under $4 per month. http://www.austinenergy.com/wps/portal/ae/rates/residential-...
Would you go out and hunt your food? Or buy processed food at the nearest grocery? Same concept.

You get your stuff done by letting somebody else worry about the other stuff, but that doesn't come for free. To gain more out of something, you must lose more of something else. It's balance, nothing is free.
Either way it will be left to people other than Hearn to decide. I admire Hearn for his very many hours spent on this seemingly intractable problem, and I understand his frustration. I just think it's premature to declare this undertaking a failure.

XT may still be the go-to option when scale and transaction bandwidth actually starts being an existential problem.

You'll find that people rarely react as urgently as they need to until the problem starts making their wallet lighter. But for the last year Bitcoin has increased both in popularity and price. And even at their slowest, actual settlement times of transferring monetary value on the BitCoin network are still lifetimes faster than clearances on ACH or other traditional financial networks, which means Bitcoin still has a competitive advantage over the traditional financial system. When that competitive advantage starts going away, I have an intuition that the block size will suddenly increase. I don't know for sure, but I have a feeling.
> Doesn't this all seem a bit dramatic?

Precisely. I find amusing how every time there is a trend up in the price, there is a flood of doom sayers, as though they want to force the price down...

I think the bitcoin network is fine. These issues will eventually be resolved, although not likely to OP's satisfaction or the way he wants to solve them.
I really want to try this out myself now.

Is it really possible that people just continue standing there while not getting why they are doing it? Don't they even care to ask?

Feels like it would take just a single guy to ask: "What are we looking at?" For everyone to realize that they are acting like fools.
Ubuntu has actively moved away from directing users to Launchpad to report a bug from a crash, and instead moved towards reporting to a crash database where they're triaged by actual developers.

Debian, in a similar vein, doesn't even have a web form to report bugs. As a result, almost every bug I've gotten on a Debian package has been clueful. At the very least, I know what version of the software they're running.

I've managed repositories that have gotten hundreds of low-quality issues. The poor filtering and curation functionality of GitHub ensures that a good deal of my spare time I have to work on those projects is spent managing the inbound issue flow, which is at least 90% noise.
LTE, when compared to 3G, drops a lot of complexity and basically defines a data link for IP to flow in. Telephony services are then implemented via IP.

Of course the transmission itself is still as proprietary and filled with regulations as all GSM standards; I just noted that it should be easier to somehow "sandbox" the communication via LTE now than with older technologies.

It's still not the solution and I'm fully aware of it.
Semi-related: I feel like there should be an open source dumbphone project. Smartphones have a lot of bells and whistles with a large attack area but many people just want to make calls. Sure this wouldn't fix the baseband issue, but it seems the safest way to ensure isolation between personal information and potentially hostile cellular blobs is to never put the information on the device in the first place. A small, open, dialer-only yet potentially extensible cellular platform would be really welcome, I think. Maybe something like this [1] using the rpi zero as a base with some 3d printed cases, reverse engineer what you can otherwise. Replicant is a noble project, but chasing android versions, screen sizes, video codecs, proprietary hardware locks etc is an uphill battle and kind of a distraction IMHO.

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/piphone-home-made-raspberry...

edit: typo
For the first 110 meters, the Hindenburg had a "controlled" decent into Lakehurst, too.
True, but it's hard to find that in large companies, based on my experience. Too much middle management can create lots of pictures political maneuvering and backstabbing.

My guess is that politics increase as performance of the company goes down. When things are good it's great, when things are bad the knives come out.
Try the matrix: https://matrix.org/

I found it after trying to write a reasonable XMPP client (previously commented on here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9772968 ) and haven't looked back since.

I use Matrix on the desktop, my ipad, and my android phone -- the much vaunted multi-device cross-platform success story that seems to be the one nice thing people have to say about facebook chat, you can have that with FOSS too! -- and just for an out-of-left-field bonus, it replaces my need for an IRC bouncer because they have a bridge for that. Finding Matrix was probably my best FOSS discovery of all 2015.
Surprised that a product person without data would go on record saying that an issue big enough to warrant a co-signed open letter isn't important enough for Github to address. The best product people I've worked with start by getting as much information as possible first before making decisions.
I'd also prefer 19" racks, but for home server, I'd advise against it due to the fact that most rack cases are unbearably noisy thanks to higher RPM fans and the way the air flow is designed in the case. I'd like to put in quiet, slow 120mm fans, but I've not seen 19" rack case that could easily accommodate them.
Another reason it would never happen: Publishers like to charge different prices to different countries, usually based on the average income in that country. So US citizens pay more than, say, Indians.
The Zappos Holacracy documents I read were nuts. Bad, batshit crazy. "Tensions" and "next-actions" and "accountabilities" and Policies and Domains and . . . the Holacracy Constitution reads like they were going for flat, but freaked out and decided to obfuscate a power structure after all. The Glassfrog documents are the hesitation marks of ditching a hierarchy. It's like they want people to execute a script rather than actually do work. At its core, Glassfrog is afraid of itself.

Try some of the documentation here: http://www.holacracy.org/constitution#art1

(Oh, and it looks like there are companies that will consult with you and help you move to a Holocracy. Big surprise).

I work in an org that is flat. There's none of that nonsense. You don't need it. You really don't.
> There is absolutely no reason that approved anti-cancer drugs in one cancer type and stage should be limited to just those cases.

Can you expand on that?
gitlab.com is dog slow and my code is too important to risk self hosting.
Chipotle’s New Mantra: Safe Food, Not Just Fresh
Licensing knowledge is insane. If copyright is ever crippled, we will see a cultural renaissance.
Fixing asynchronous I/O, again
It means that the fundamental innovation of Bitcoin - peer-to-peer, trust-less, distributed concensus - is a solid one, even a technological breakthrough. And it means as first-mover in implementing that innovation, Bitcoin will have continued life. It also means that the problem has not reached a sufficient level of urgency that the scales have tipped to the pro-block-size-increase camp, but that I believe it will.
Nodecommerce: express based node ecommerce api. Code from my failed start-up
btrfs has better and more features than ZFS; it's just not as mature yet. And ZFS can't be used in the Linux kernel because its license is incompatible. If you have a problem with that, I suggest you complain to the owners of ZFS.

What's so great about FreeBSD? I see BSD people say that all the time, but you never see much actual usage of BSD anywhere. Instead of almost all developers being wrong, maybe you're the one who's wrong.

Acting with taste? That's completely irrelevant to technical issues.
> Facebook, Google, and the DOD all rely on yubikeys now to mitigate a lot of remote attack vectors.

Yes, but not as the sole factor. I've overseen a rather large deployment of Yubikeys, and I believe they provide a huge security improvement compared to other second-factor alternatives.

> The only way I know to mitigate an attacker hijacking keys like this without significantly inhibiting workflow is configuring automatic ejection and re-enumerate the device on touch.

Agreed. I was very happy when this was added in the YubiKey IV.
Maybe something more noble than a social coding site?

I doubt it. Github has a reputation problem. I wouldn't put anything sensitive on there, given the attitude github leadership showed about privacy ethics in the Julie Horvath incident.
Fortunately GitHub now has competition in the free offerings. It's no longer a question of being good enough. If GitLab is better, and OSS projects start moving to GitLab in large numbers, those OSS developers will start asking their employers to pay for GitLab instead of GitHub when they need the paid offerings.

GitHub not improving the free offerings while competitors do will affect their income.
On Tuesday, Jan 26 (6PM), Ryan Park (Runscope Principal Infrastructure Eng) will be presenting at the AWS Popup Loft in San Francisco. He'll go behind the scenes, into the weeds, about how his team migrated to DynamoDB. Ryan is one swell and smart cat, and is a fountain of ops/eng experience and knowledge. I'm definitely going.

http://www.meetup.com/AWS-SANFRANCISCO/events/227832959/
> No, only that the article is being misleading in it's breathless clickbaitiness.

If you read the entire article, you would not describe it as click-bait.

Additionally, I agree with kevinwang's assessment that the statement by Hearn that you quoted is 100% in line with what Hearn is saying in his Medium article. The key quote is "...the system we actually use today with the block chain, isn't going to change the world at all due to the 1mb limit.". Hearn's Medium article is -actually- ~50-> ~75% about this 1MB limit. (Spoiler alert: it's not a limit of the Bitcoin protocol, but rather a political decision made by many of the Bitcoin Core developers.)
Simple-restify: No bull-shit server setup
So much wrong with this post.
When you say small business who do you refer to?
Where to meet people with problems ?

I am trying to get into entrepreneurship. So far I have read countless articles about creating, running a bootstrapped startup. I have read about things to do and not to do. I created one business website last year but abandoned plan to run it because of job change. I am getting started again.

Most compelling thing I have read is to strive for solving real world problem than engineering one that's not there. Small business provide incredible opportunity for small player and also provide potential for growth.

When you say small business who are you referring to ? Doctors , lawyers, candy shops, local cloths shops ?
Sorry, I don't know where to meet SMB people and know about their problems ?

I have strong technical background and currently work for a tech company in bay area for data analytics services. Analytics space is overloaded with tools and services so I am reluctant to try anything new in this space

I can try something based on what is being done already but that's just not novel and basically rat race for revenue share.

Meanwhile, what are your problems or what problems you are trying to solve if you don't mind sharing.

Thank you.
His concrete examples are of problems, but not of "those who control bitcoin preventing it from growing". The block size debate is ongoing and the work on it is widespread. Just a few days ago Bitcoin Classic was announced with wide miner support.

Bitcoin doesn't move fast and break things-- and that's one of its strengths, not a weakness.

Also, its inherently democratic- those with the hashing power , and thus the most on the line, determine its future. IT's in their best interests to find solutions-- in a considered way.

I don't see that this system has broken down at this point.
"Really all I've taken away from this is to not really worry about state laws."

If you want to change an entire industry, then yes. Sometimes it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

Uber has opened up the ride-sharing market to many more people. You don't need a $1,000,000 medallion to make money as a driver any longer.

Since the monopoly has been forcibly broken, it also created competition, which in turn lowers the price for the consumer.

It's a win-win. They are only breaking laws protecting unethical business practices of the taxi cab companies.
James Joyce would probably not have taken kindly to being called "English"
FWIW, it is coming from the very top. https://twitter.com/solomonstre/status/687773282104287232
The Hypocrisy of “Judge Judy”
Elderly Tokyoites Forced from Their Homes by Olympic Construction Projects
They should spend that money on developing and building SkyTran instead.
Sure it does, about like the USSR supported freedom of speech. What do you report in your daily standup? What if your prototyping takes four weeks instead of two? How about if your problem is particularly gnarly and it takes six weeks? What if it's only reasonable to devote, say, two people out of the team of six to prototyping? Do they report status (which they already know) to each other? "Syncing up" with them is useless for the rest of the team. What if I'm already an adult and therefore don't need adult supervision? Why would you want to interrupt my "make time" with your bullshit, useless standup, thus knocking me out of my zone for an hour or more?

On the teams that I ran, we relied on a weekly meeting, lasting about 30-45 minutes to go over what we did last week and what the plans are for this week. The rest is handled perfectly well with ad-hoc communication. Those teams were far more "agile" than any of the Agile teams I've seen, since people expended all their effort on achieving the goals as opposed to figuring out what they're going to say in the next standup.
Wouldn't they at least ask after a while if that was the case?
As someone with a similar build (Freenas, 8x3tb raidz2 main array, 3tb scratch/hot spare, 2tb scratch, and 500gb ssd for jails)

I would love a rackmount for drive accessibility, but I can't justify 10x the case cost and additional engineering in making it as quiet and clean as my fractal design R4. Rackmount stuff just isn't designed to be either of those, high static pressure fans and expectation of pre-filtered air. (That said I'd totally be willing to pay ~500$ if such a case existed)
True.

How about improving Gittorrent?
1 W draws about 9 kW-hr/year, so for residential pricing of about 10 c/kW-hr, you get about 1 $/W-yr.
> otherwise you're effectively mining a very expensive altcoin which no merchants or exchanges accept.

This is not the case. You could run XT for example and remain compatible, which was precisely its adoption strategy? It just simply did not reach consensus (aka CPU power).

> By mining with Bitcoin XT you will produce blocks with a new version number. This indicates to the rest of the network that you support larger blocks. When 75% of the blocks are new-version blocks, a decision has been reached to start building larger blocks that will be rejected by Bitcoin Core nodes.

(from https://bitcoinxt.software/)
I know that ZFS is cool and LVM isn't, but I literally just finished repairing my LVM-based home NAS, and it left me with a good feeling about LVM. Overall, a stack of md, LVM and XFS is a lot more complicated than ZFS, but each piece is more understandable in isolation.
Buses are crap and should just be eliminated. If you want good public transit, you need to build SkyTran. $4B could do a lot of good in developing SkyTran and getting it so that cities spend money on deploying it instead of wasting that money on roads.
I've deployed a Gogs installation at home and am very happy with it. It's not Github, but it's great for my needs, and I can create accounts for friends to use privately, which is fantastic. I've tried GitLab and it is also very good.
please stop saying 'BitCoin'. It's Bitcoin.
Because just about any other CA also offer the domain validated certificates through the same kind of validation process?
They brought all that stuff back. They've even added a new coins feature that lets you buy upgrades for your checkins. (Buy with coins you earn from checkins, not real money.)

It's pretty fun.
Google Summer of Code 2016
How many people are in your organization?
Lob (YC S13) is hiring software engineers to build APIs