skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very good address, pretty much echoing the points from DFW's excellent speech (https://www.fs.blog/2012/04/david-foster-wallace-this-is-wat...):

"That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing."

Granted, I live my 99% of my life in this despicable state that Wallace described so well, but for brief moments, when I can muster up the will choose what to think, it feels great. Actually, let me tell you exactly what it feels like: it's like that moment in Matrix Revolutions where Trinity pushes their ship above the clouds, and for one very brief moment, before returning to the ugliness, fight, and of course, her death, she gets to experience a gorgeous sun-lit scene. And, for giving me that understanding in such simple terms, I will always be grateful to DFW!
True.

My days of google fan-boy-ism are long over :-/
I think at least Jonas is aware of users like that -- there were some discussions on that concept during his Magit Kickstarter campaign[1]:

> Make Magit more accessible to non-Emacs users

> I think that Magit can be an excellent Git interface for users of other editors and IDEs. It would be a shame if its user-base continued to be limited to people who use Emacs for editing purposes.

> To appeal to non-Emacs users, Magit has to be made more accessible. Additionally I intend to provide simplified Emacs configurations and documentation that teaches just enough Emacs to be able to use Magit. See Magit for users of other editors for more information.

[1]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1681258897/its-magit-th...
One could argue that both Atlassian and Github were to some extent successful, because they kept the open source competitors away by giving out free licenses to open source projects.

With these free options available, people in community were less interested in putting effort to free (as in speech) alternatives for these closed source products.
> I personally don't know a single person that is subscribed to it even after spending 5 years in academia and several others in the job pool.

You're looking at the wrong people. It's companies who are paying for GitHub.
> That's very exaggerated and it might discourage people who would enjoy working at Google from applying.

But it's irrelevant to what I wanted to point to: that somebody already accepted Ken Thompson to Google. Then some absurd bureaucracy decided that Ken Thompson has to pass the exams given to the young beginners. Probably reasoning something like somebody here "explained" "so that developers can be moved around."

Whoever is not aware of these "details", please see my another post for what Ken Thompson invented before coming to Google. Such "minor things" like the Unix OS, the language that preceded and inspired C and the currently used kind of regular expressions.
"In total Myhrvold’s firm has acquired 95,000 patents and launched or been behind dozens of lawsuits, making it a giant patent troll. But Intellectual Ventures’ litigation strategy has been dealt some setbacks. The nation’s top patent court has thrown out patents Intellectual Ventures has tried to assert against companies like Capital One. This week a federal appeals court issued a ruling that will make it very difficult for Intellectual Ventures to assert a patent it had sued Ericsson for infringing."
And my update settings.

I understand the need for security, but updates shouldn't break my computer either.
Most of these features (and problems) appeared after YT was acquired, but demonetization and account problems (including wholesale blocking) seem specific to Google, so I agree.
Yes, thank you. People are quick to point out the Microsoft hasn't done anything detrimental to society, forget that their software is such a mess. We're too focused on judging companies based on whether employees get paternity leave, an offhand remark by a CEO, or recent scandals, that we're forgetting about the quality of software we're installing on our computers. When I saw a bunch of spammy games like March of Empires and Candy Crush installed with my Windows 10 Pro, I thought I got a bad copy -- instead it was truly just part of their operating system. They force their terrible antivirus (which keeps quarantining files I'm working on, when I'm working with low-level .exe patching) and forced updates and reboots. I wish there was a way to have Windows that's just an operating system.
Yes. Any centralization/single point of failure developing on the internet is a bug.
Tusk: an unofficial, open-source Evernote app
LinkedIn? The network everyone loved to hate? I don't think anything has changed in that regard, if anything, Microsoft are probably 1% more trustworthy compared to the super-shady LinkedIn management of old.
Google should start delisting their indexes for that reason, just like they are doing for sites with popups.
GitLab does not recommend hosting it in such a low-spec [1]. Would love to see if such setup is still feasible, though.

[1] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/install/requirements.html#memory
Good! Getting rid of Atom for Visual Studio Code should make things a lot better (and allow them to free up some staff). And if they eliminate they head of "community" that makes public repository owners have to tiptoe around any sensitive snowflake's sensibilities, that will fix most of the remaining problems.
Although Clojure is my favourite language I find web development difficult with it due to auth for which Buddy is the standard. Buddy's integration with Luminus is opaque at best and the Buddy docs themselves I found unhelpful. You're left with the impression that Clojure web development is for experts who already understand how it all works. Total contrast with Rails where there are great resources for average developers and newcomers. I think this stems from the Clojure community's reluctance to embrace web frameworks.
Finally, we will be able to use the same login for both Skype and GitHub.
Skype UI was changed dramatically for virtually no obvious reason and resulted in the usage of skype to be way more annoying for basically no good reason. They then rebranded Lync to be called Skype for Business which is a giant mess because like so many microsoft enterprise products it uses some strange scheme to connect to either a web-based server or to an enterprise server that invariably is not setup correctly and never works reliably. So they basically bought skype which everybody loved and turned it into something that a huge amount of people don't like now due to UI changes and created a second version of Skype that basically barely works and many people are forced to use at work..
Yes but you still have configurations and docs referencing the repo to change. Then find a mean to alert all interested persons. And then write a script to migrate the issues.

It's not a big deal, it's just work that I don't want to do. Espacially since I love github.
It's like saying a shell doesn't follow the Unix philosophy because it runs other programs.

Each package does one thing, presumably well, is interchangable, customizable, and interops with everything else.
Microsoft should be able to leverage Bing to do good deep searches across all code. This would be a big win for everyone (and Bing!)
Well, considering all this "telemetry" thing they have been pushing down its customer's throats, I wouldn't be comfortable at all with this move.
Unfortunately that is the one thing I can't really answer! I moved out of this space shortly after we published this work so I'm not currently up to date with the research in the area.

That said if you like this sort of work, you should keep an eye out for papers coming out from Tromer/Genkin et. al., they often present impressive results:

https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/230

https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/806

https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/119

and stuff from the guys at NewAE is usually well written and worth the read (although they are a startup and probably less focused on papers these days):

https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1047

https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/810

Other than that I'd suggest checking out what's published to CHES/Asiacrypt/CARDIS/COSADE.
I could envision pre-configured vps images maintained in the open by volunteers to make it more practical. They could have unattended-upgrades configured for major patching and the community could help migrate between major LTS releases.

It isn't ideal but it might be doable at least for some projects. Maybe devops people want new ways to contribute to open source too!
And yet the article mentions losses, companies might not be enough
Honest question: do the still threaten Linux-related companies with suing for violations of unspecified Microsoft patents?
If you seriously want to defend a practice where two people do the same thing and then one of them is declared the victim and the other the perpetrator, based on either gender or whoever complains first, then you are the nutjob.
If you couldn't get to phishtank.com on 4G then it's probably not your ISP being "hacked", unless of course your landline and mobile ISPs are the same.
I think whats adding to the confusion here is the "I am a Language X expert". I suspect the Am and I need to be interchanged there.
I think it is naive to believe than any company that is beholden to investors would choose altruism over profit. Most corporate altruism is just marketing.

I don't think Microsoft is any more altruistic now, they just have adjusted their corporate strategy to recognize that supporting openness is good for business. That is enough for me.
I've always found it too difficult to choose the "decentralized" option for many services. It's just not convenient enough to spin up my own gitlab server, or own email. I tried to do both of those things a while ago when I was still new to Linux, and gave up due to the number of steps involved which I inevitably fucked up.

The solution for me would be packages which hold my hand through the install process to make installing such software as easy as possible. Obviously, packaging software in this way would take way more work, and people qualified to do this would rather package more software rather than hold some noob's hand.

That being said, hopefully in the future when software gets even more mature, repackaging will become less necessary, and this type of packages might become more common, allowing decentralized systems to be easy enough to set up that they become common.
As one of my pet projects, I'm trying to resurrect Google's Code Search (a fast search indexer that supports regular expressions).

It's in alpha stage so far and lots of useful features (like multi-line search) are missing but you can already try it out for Crates.io and Hackage: https://codesearch.aelve.com. Indexing all of npmjs is coming soon.
> Quickly? Firebase + React.

Came here to recommend this myself.

I built an SPA with React + Firebase (auth, db, hosting, and all) to help my wife and I track our kids allowance and spending in just over a day: https://parentbank.actridge.com/ (did I mention Firebase hosting allows HTTPS on custom domains?)

It's an awesome combo that is seriously under-utilized.
Ouch.

So, my startup is positioning itself as a kind of "GitHub for X". When investors ask about our exit strategy, I have to be honest and say that acquisitions the big platform players in the space are largely ruled out; if we are to remain a neutral networking medium within our market, we can't be biased -- or even the suspicion of bias -- towards any particular company within that market.

To illustrate this, the example I've always use is: "Could GitHub still be GitHub if it was acquired by Microsoft? Of course not: a meaningful subset of its userbase could then no longer trust the platform to be a neutral intermediary, and the resulting exodus -- even if small -- would have a corrosive knock-on effect with regards to overall networking effect lock-in. So such an acquisition could never happen, because it would too obviously destroy value."

Didn't expect to have the opportunity to validate that particular hypothesis!
> Something changed in society the past 20 years in a way I can't understand.

> My first kid turned super nasty as soon as she got a phone.

I think you might be on to something here...
Well not all the critism might be directly aimed at MS but more at GitHub losing its impartial / neutral status.

However regarding MS specifically; I don't know your age but a lot of us were around when Microsoft was a different company then it is today. The Microsoft of the Halloween documents ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents ), the Microsoft that killed Netscape with very anticompetitive practices, the Microsoft that had to pay Sun billions for its anticompetitive behaviour, the Microsoft that called opensource a cancer, etc. etc. You know what they say: Trust arrives walking and leaves riding...
It was due on the day I finished it. Sorry for the grammar mistakes.
Eyes of glass in twin hoops!
I think it is a long term goal.

"Old" schoolers have and will likely have for ever that evil 90s vision of MS. However it is changing a bit in that people too. They still may be evil, but at least the look more modern (opensource, new technology, using/contributing to Linux etc).

However the important thing (for MS) here is new people. If you come into the scene now or in a few years you only get to know the "new" masked MS image. Yes, they are still doing dubious stuff but is all under the hoods, buried by layers of hype, cloud, linux and fireworks.

Rebranding some big stablished company with that kind of history is something that takes a long long time.
He said that right after in the brackets that it's the same provider :)
Tech scandals from the archive...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9786545

But now they're partnering with Signal so maybe that's a good case about how things change over time:

https://signal.org/blog/skype-partnership/
As a child with a c64 at home, every school I attended had computer labs stocked with Apple IIes. I was often struck by the inferiority of the Apple II to the Commodore (to say nothing of how impressive the Amiga was). It couldn't even display monochrome text normally.
Microsoft is opening LinkedIn up to other tools while completely maintaining their goal of not sharing your data (Iframe integrations so no data is shared). They're expanding capability without selling out users
Well, according to coffee snobs it's really easy to fuck up a cup of coffee.
Sorry! I’ll keep looking.
You may like this channel (someone recommended to me but I haven't watched yet):

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJjSDX-jUChzOEyok9XYRJQ

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBVNJo7nhINSVQXlPu7xW...
According to https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/11/github-has-a-110-million-run..., GitHub had a run rate of $200 million in August 2017, but still is not profitable per the Bloomberg article. The writing was on the wall here. They've focused on user growth and solidifiying their infrastructure, without much concern for profit - of course they're looking for an exit.

I wonder if they chose to not go public due to the overlap with the Atlassian market. There wouldn't be much to distinguish themselves in an IPO. They are - in the minds of many developers - better and cooler than Atlassian, but with less revenue. Perhaps GitHub figured a buyout had the better expected value, rather than risk being viewed as a me-too by investors.

I never really understood why GitHub succeeded over a decentralized model. It's a social network for a service that does not need to be a social network. The small git hosting services that existed before GitHub got huge were just fine. It's like what Reddit did to smaller forums - Reddit was not better, but it won the popularity lottery when Digg destroyed itself. I think the internet would be better without these massive centralized services. I hope the users who do decide to flee GitHub don't aggregate elsewhere and end up in the same situation a few years from now.
I cannot agree more with this.

It boggles my mind why GitHub's search finds results across various commits, giving patchy results. It would be far better and likely easier for GitHub to just search HEAD. This frustrates me about GitHub every day.
Unfortunately, that misses the bulk of user communications. Those bug reports and issues are also tremendously important. And since they link back to commits, its essential to obtain that history as well and maintain the appropriate link between the 2.

Else, changes were made for "reasons", and those justifications are effectively lost.
Check out this: Sun Surveyor Lite by Adam Ratanahttps://itunes.apple.com/lt/app/sun-surveyor-lite/id55275440...
My layman's suggestion is that, rather than trying to read the ancients, start with how ideas from them and more current philosophers are relevant in today's debates. This is akin to diving into using a prog language with little understanding rather than reading books about it, it's more fun!

If you want to follow the above approach I think the best resource is the fantastic Philosophy Bites podcast (http://www.philosophybites.com/) where philosophers are interviewed. And if you're more of a printed matter type of person, they have books with the transcribed interviews, too (https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Bites-David-Edmonds/dp/019...).

This, I think, is a great way to identify the areas of philosophy you're interested in to zoom in further.
> Forces updates are a travesty.

You can disable this. Google on the use for modifying the hosts file to block your machine's access to Windows Update if you're not sure how to do this.

> They hold some games hostage and refuse to release them on Windows...

Wait -- I thought you were forced, as a gamer, to use Windows. I don't follow.

> UWP is trash...

This is true. UWP tries to be many things, like a single container for desktop, tablet, and (Windows) mobile apps. In the end it mostly fails.

> I'm not allowed to not run an antivirus program.

Uh, dude: I run Windows 7 and Windows 10 machines and none of them FORCE me to use antivirus. They nag about it for a while but those alerts and nags can be disabled.
Clippy was last activated by default back in 2001 (!). When are we going to let go of this old joke?
The final step will be acquiring StackOverflow. After that, nearly every developer will find their next job via Microsoft.
This is a little unfortunate but I think theres a possibility this could turn out to be a positive thing for both MS and GH. I hope so at least.
Yes, how do you think I got malaria in the first place ? I stopped Malarone after 3 months like everyone on site. Nobody wants to get damage organs. Lariam was worse though, it attacked the brain.
Not only California.

The same could be said for Saudi Arabia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrigation_in_Saudi_Arabia#/me...

(and also in Libya IIRC)
Personally I just don't like their software. One by one, I stopped using all of their products and services.

I wouldn't say I hate Microsoft, but I wouldn't be surprised if they changed github into something I wouldn't want to use anymore.
http://oscoin.io/ a team in Berlin is working on it for some time.
It seems to say that the to be in the bottom fifth in the US household income must be less than $22,095 (2001)[0]. That's very close to the federal poverty line. Not exactly but close.

The way news an documentaries talk about the poverty trap I was expecting 80%+.

[0] - http://ftp.iza.org/dp1938.pdf
Still it detracts from the overall quality of the article.
I'm hopeful. I like typescript and Visual Code. I like their linux subsystem on windows granted that I don't use it since I'm not a windows user.
This is great for Gitlab. I'm going to try to use more and more.
Could be a game changer if it works
Utah has used firing squads for executions, the most recent was in 2010. Previous law allowed the inmate to choose the execution method, but now I think a firing squad is specified to be used if the lethal injection drugs are unavailable.

> "There were five marksmen: They're all volunteers and they're police officer trained."

> Of the five rifles, one is loaded with blanks so that no one knows for sure who fired the bullets.

https://www.npr.org/2015/04/05/397672199/utah-brings-back-fi...
I know several small, medium, large companies paying github to keep their repos private. Also, github offers on-premises installation of their product.
I saw this and thought it was great, but simultaneously thought all hope is lost if Utah is setting the standard for being reasonable.
Of course, but most doctors don't even know malarone can be used to cure malaria.

Also, anything that is not produced in africa will just make them more dependant.
Time to move to Gitlab...
> Forced Windows 10 migration

Incorrect. Nagged, yes, but my Windows 7 machine that runs my Primera 4102 DVD duplicator still runs Windows 7 and will for as long as I own it. And it wasn't that hard to find the "don't nag me about upgrading ever again" option on Windows 7.
Seems to me its doesn't make sense to have a gov sell bonds in a currency that it doesn't have control of. This includes countries outside of the EU that use the Euro. When buying bonds of a country, there should mean the investor believes in the direction of the country / the governance there / believes it is low risk that the bonds would lose value or the strength of the economy would collapse. That's the risk that gets taken by the investor. It doesn't make sense to peg it to an external countries' performance. Of course it sweetens the deal but makes things confusing too.
Or even "thing made of glass for eyes for reading."
Microsoft being (possibly) the biggest 'partner' of the NSA is one of the worst aspects of this acquisition and underrepresented in these discussions here.
Collisions, yes, but preimages are the bigger concern with hostile actors in git IMO.
I guess in this case you are measuring performance in money earned then, not in quality of work. In which case they’re not outperforming in the field of IT but field of finance.
Probably elsewhere too, especially where there are no artificial obstacles to limit the ingress of "external" people to a field.

IMHO the missing metric is "potential": the ability of an individual to thrive and get better over time despite possible previous misfortune, change of mind/hearth (or even just plain laziness) that might have made them score badly in the aforementioned metrics.
It has allowed LinkedIn to remain free for one customer base (professional networks) while expanding sales and recruiting tools (navigator) without compromising user information (InMail rather than your private email unless you've opted as such).
Just in case people are looking for one more alternative, it looks like no one has mentioned codegiant.io yet.
I haven't done any work to implement refinements myself, but I do know that basically it came down to something that you could write an inline cache against, guarded against the class version, so a simple word guard that you were doing anyway when you called any method.
https://github.com/axic/mango
I don't use any product from Microsoft. I understand Microsoft is for-profit, but there's no way they can get a single dime from me, and I don't want to become a second-class citizen. That's why I would be leaving.
Huh.... GitHub only searches head for me. This is confusing as I've often wanted to search other branches and can't find a way to...
The problem with any voting system is that politicians lie, so IMO we are actually voting on who is the best liar, ie, the most believable liar.

To me, it would be better if we could have continuous voting: everyone can re-vote once a day, for any candidate they are elibigle to vote for. Then a politician can be voted out of office at any time, with a new candidate taking their place.

We are still voting for the best liar, but at least when someone in office proves that they are a liar, we can get rid of them.