skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Like most things, "Open Source" is relative and spans a gradient.

It can be open but undocumented, it can be open but with closed components, it can be open but broken, it can be open but closed to outside contributors, and so on.

The most important question is whether it's forkable?

If X decided to go against its community, how painful would it be to fork X and for the community to continue without the maintainer's support?

Is GitLab more open source than GitHub? Absolutely.

If I committed substantial resources integrating with "the GitLab way of doing things" and then GitLab pulled the rug on me, would I be able to retain my investment by forking off the product? For most things, yes.

I'm all for GitLab becoming even more open source, but they deserve the accolades they've gotten so far.
The numbers we were looking at were probably 50-80% labor, depending on how much was done in house vs 3rd party. Culture materials was most expensive piece of the materials cost but prob under 5% of total cost of manufacturing.
Having control of the copyright gives you control of the development process as well. So getting 1000 patches into a project just becomes a whole lot easier if you own the copyright.
> Returning to the point, this attack would be unaffected by Microsoft purchasing anything.

I was agreeing with you :)
The second-worst poet in English
Which, one could say, is what open source is all about right? Get people or organisations motivated to improve upon code and share this with the rest of the community so they can reap the rewards as well. No one expects anyone to do stuff only for the greater good. The greater good is the best result of open source, but it isn't the motivation.
I agree, and MS also has some pretty good OSS chops these days. But Github itself is closed source. This is something that I think needs to change, or Github needs to disappear. There are good OSS solutions now that we need to make grow.

I also rely a lot on Github and don't want to move, but I'm going to bite the bullet if they don't open up. I don't like the hypocrisy, and I don't want to be an enabler anymore.
The Map is Not the Territory!

https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/The_map_is_not_the_territory

Another piece of widespread ignorance I've seen here on HN, is the treatment of conservation laws as if they're baked into the fabric of reality. This results in programmers making philosophical/cosmological arguments in ignorance. As far as we know, conservation laws are not baked into reality. Instead, they are very useful analysis tools which can take advantage of symmetries. (Or near-symmetries.) Any given conservation law can disappear if a given symmetry doesn't apply, but Noether's Theorem still remains.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04ERSb06dOg

If you want to see an example of how social media "bubbles" can impede the dissemination of knowledge, note that I've actually been flagged on HN for trying to explain this, apparently because someone misread this as advocacy for perpetual motion machines. It is not! (Also, because I used <facepalm> -- but when you're wrong, you're wrong, and when you're wrong and you think it's clever, it feels worse.)

(That title, "The Map is Not the Territory" acts as a pointer to a series of literary references. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Map_and_the_Territory )
> But I've noticed even with my cousins abroad they've mostly transitioned fully to WhatsApp.

I've managed to get my friends and family over to other channel so we are now almost 100% Facebook free except for a few log in with Facebook and the occasional Instagram (also declining I think).

(Disclaimer: I trust WhatsApps crypto since a number of cryptographers have audited it but I still do not want them to have my metadata. I mean, seriously: the crypto can be unbreakable but why do we think Facebook bought WhatsApp and made it free?)
Yep totally agree, Twitter only exists because of network effects.

> even though they were announcing loud and clear that they were going to cost money

On the other hand, WhatsApp announced this back when scammers aka mobile networks still charged a ton for texts, and WhatsApp was the only cheaper option.

Now the masses are trained to expect everything for free, so it's really hard to get them to pay for something. It's not even about social networks, even getting someone to buy a stand-alone app is hard enough - outside of the tech circle, most people consider it weird that I pay for apps. Even getting them to pay for the likes of Spotify is hard (most non-tech people I know are still on the free tier and get their music fix on Youtube, with ads and everything).

This is why I don't think a paid service is unlikely to succeed and become mainstream. A social network needs to be free, at least until it reaches a critical mass, at which point it can switch to a "freemium" model with a free (possibly ad-supported) base tier and a premium, ad-free tier.
A nice, safe introduction.

There's a lot of talk about people leaving github for other platforms. If there are actually doing it, it seems like a short-sighted move. I understand why people who lived through the earlier years of Microsoft are skeptical. Microsoft did a very good job of earning a lot of ill will.

But things have changed. Microsoft's primary focus seems to be is Azure and everything they do needs to be looked through that lens. They need developers of all stripes using Azure. So they will do everything to attract all developers. It's in their business interest.
Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2016)
This is accurate, and a sign of the times. My 7yo enjoys programming Lego Mindstorms, and my brother was messing around with redstone circuitry in Minecraft by 8. The barrier of exposure to engineering concepts keeps getting lower.
Another free market solution (well, kind of), is for the price of CO₂ to rise enough so it may be economically feasible to "buy the rainforest [to] let it be rainforest". This also should of course come with some mean of allotting taxed resources to the CO₂ consumers.
JavaScript, What Are You?
In the parent's defense, the two features listed aren't really what I think of when I think of "enterprise" features. I think more of things like SAML and Active Directory integration, auditing, etc.
I think the problem is Facebook's lack of transparency here. As a user, suppose I have some information that I've marked as "not available to third-party apps". Then I might be surprised to find out that Blackberry's servers have access to that data via a secret API, even if it is to implement a "Facebook experience".
You have no idea who Nat Friedman is, do you?
The incentives are really not aligned here. Over time it's likely more features will be removed from or never added to CE. Gitlab provides only a very basic plugin system [1] so that nobody else can provide these basic features into CE. (Instead users are encouraged to contribute back to CE.) So, yes, the only option is "fork and fuck off." I don't predict a happy future for users of GitLab CE.

[1] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/administration/plugins.html
What's missing without transfer.fsckobjects ?
It depends what you care about. Some would say it doesn't matter if the server software is free and open source, so long as you can use the service without running any proprietary software yourself. And GitLab is pretty good in that regard, with the website's JavaScript under a free license.

https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria-evaluation.html
Ask HN: How do I tell friends that I no longer want to develop “our” startup
I was promised 25% stake in a webapp a few months ago by some family friends. The whole team consists of 2 project owners and myself. After a few months of free development in my spare time, I'm about 30% done with this app. My feelings on the matter/investment/my time have since soured. I still like these people, but how do I explain to them that I hate working on this project for free?
Since I always strive to get the smallest possible bundle sent to the user this is a huge step forward. Now looking forward to tree shaking :)
The article says that one of the attractive qualities if string theory is that it has no free parameters. But then says that the particles a forces of the standard model are determined by the number and size of extra dimensions. Those sound an awful lot like free parameters.

Can someone with more than a passing familiarity with the field explain?
You make it sound like Microsoft tried and GitHub shut them down on helping out with Electron?
Try loading the mobile versions of web pages. Facebook for example has a super-low-end non-JS version of the site at https://m.facebook.com/
> People saying that it is easy to migrate don’t know what they are
> talking about. GitHub isn’t just Git hosting, but a social network
> of open source developers and projects. You can’t migrate stars,
> issues with comments and the history of PRs, all linked to the
> profiles of their authors.

Every single for-profit company works their ass off to build a "moat" around their business and to create switching costs, even if they boast that you can "just take your data and leave."

It is not an accident that it is difficult for non-trivial projects to "just leave GitHub." That is by design, it is part of how it grew to become the 800 pound gorilla, and it is part of why Microsoft bought them.
I'd be interested in seeing how 'parent' is defined. Does it include step-parent?
In the US, we dont associate homelessness with wealth but rather mental illness.

You can get a place to live for 400/mo dollars in the south, and easily 500$/mo with roommates in 'civilization' where there are high paying jobs.

None of this is particularly difficult to afford, even for minimum wage workers(who dont really exist).

I find this an odd topic. Living isnt hard to do in first world countries where food is plentiful, jobs pay decent, and getting space to live in is cheap.
“and then allowed those platforms to have access not only to your data, but your friends exhaustive data.”

Only for purposes of allowing the user to interact with Facebook. The platforms themselves couldn’t use the data for anything other than supporting user actions.

This is perfectly reasonable and is why APIs exist.

The issue, which has not been repeated, would be if those platforms retained data without user consent and used the data for other purposes. That would violate the contract they signed with Facebook and be bad for use privacy.

To a non technology person, these two very different things sound similar (Facebook let Microsoft access use data). But this is meaningless without more context.
I'm not sure why you keep bringing up selling to the first offer and zero arbitrage.

goatherders and I both described working with multiple buyers, and that finding the right buyer (that is, the one who will pay you $1,000 more than some other buyer) requires time and effort. When considering whether to accept an offer on the table or hold out for a better offer, the seller implicitly or explicitly considers the transaction costs (search, delay, processing, risk, privacy, etc.).

This implies non-zero arbitrage, multiple offers, and market inefficiency.
Then they should own up to that decision and realize that what they did not only helped github to be so dominant but it also actively worked against viable alternatives.

Choose more carefully next time? Maybe firefox instead of chrome? etc.
Fair enough, they're not a 100%. And to be honest, their assessment of FB is fairly accurate with the information they had at the time of publication.

FB is the exception, not the rule. Many social-local-mobile companies have come and gone burning billions of VC money without ever returning a cent to their investors.
You can self-host Github too. It's called Github Enterprise.
> Will Facebook/Google/Apple start pulling their code from GitHub?

For these companies who owned GitHub hardly plays a role. They want to attract developers and go wherever the crowds go. If there is mass migration to mercurial-superhost.com they will follow. It's just an outlet.

The question is more relevant for companies and communities who built their infrastructure on it and might worry for good or not so good reasons.
This is my thinking as well. Do I bail ship to gitlab and support more open software, or do I try to stay centralized?
Why not just scrape the site? I don’t see what the problem is.
i work on pytype [https://github.com/google/pytype], a similar project for python, and it has definitely made business sense. it lets developers code in the language they find most productive (largely due to its dynamic nature), and adds back some of the benefits of static type checking. in particular, it has caught a lot of bugs that would otherwise only have shown up in production, and perhaps not until some rare code path was hit.
You realize this is just a racist and bigoted at the "other-side" I am sure you call deplorable.
Moissanite is not a 'fake diamond'. It's Moissanite, and it's nowhere near the same league as cubic zirconia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

Some brief history refresher:

- Apple + Microsoft "collaborating" on Macintosh software = Windows

- IBM + Microsoft "collaborating" on OS/2 = the NT kernel, Windows NT

- Sybase + Microsoft "collaborating" on Sybase SQL server = MS SQL Server

- Sun + Microsoft "embracing" Java = .NET Framework

"Take it with a grain of salt".
Oh I definitely make no claim to having explored Windows development.
I'm not the person you're responding to, but I am turning 40 this year. I was also around for the terror that was Microsoft in the 90s when they were competing with Oracle for "company most desperately trying to kill open source".

I had a similar deep hatred for MS.

In the 00s I spent time as a video game developer and I was forced to use MS tools. And honestly, their developer tools were pretty good. Although I still didn't trust them, I respected them (or at least certain divisions within MS).

In the 10s, I've been mostly doing web stuff. Over the last couple of years I've started using VS Code, and it's actually a great editor and MS seems committed to it and to contributing to some other open source projects.

MS does not strike me as anywhere near the same company they were in the 90s as Gates transitioned out and Ballmer took over. Nadella seems to have a vision for MS that's much more in line with what developers actually want. (The irony of Ballmer's "DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!" is palpable.)

I wouldn't consider myself an MS fan, but I also don't view them as the devil they were then. I'm not totally sure what this means for github yet, but I am willing to wait and see before I grab my pitchfork.
Absolutely. And many of their docs can be imported to Dash.app. :-)
Andreessen Horowitz is pocketing a huge win in the $7.5B GitHub acquisition
Or tall. Or thin. Or young. Why the emphasis on what one looks like, rather than something deeper, more meaningful, like background, circumstances, class?

There are plenty of poor thin white young tall people out there strugging like most people in life.

Identity politics is dividing us all.
[https://m.do.co/c/29a494bf4511] (Digital Ocean)
MS is contributing to Electron. They benefit, but so does the wider community. This is generally how OSS works.
Also, they obviously think their idea is worth a fortune. How do I explain the idea is worth about 10% and the other 90% is coming from all the hours I've put into it?
Because people with closed source, the paying customers, now have to trust their potential biggest competitor with their source code ‽
As can be readily observed with the MS v Netscape battle over web tech (while called a browser war, my impression is that the browser was a proxy for getting a foothold in the server market).

Never mind that MS had pulled something similar vs Novell some years prior, by bundling a client with Windows and then marketing their Exchange server as a drop in replacement for Novell's Netware. Just set up a NT box in the server room, configure the PCs, and phase out Netware.
Sure, but that's essentially a branding criticism (labeling them "enterprise" features) rather than a criticism of the "open core" model.
I disagree completely, honestly. If you are signing up for a service like Facebook and they are asking you to click a bunch of boxes, it's not unrealistic to expect you to

a) either understand what you are clicking on or
b) just refuse to click on it

what is unrealistic is to expect society to babysit you every single time a moderately complex choice is presented to you.
Do you not self-host?
I thought you were playing off it with "...tone back the crazy hype pitch..."
I started with Rust...I had to get a tetanus shot at a very young age.
Exactly. (1) is Enterprise edition, same as proper (3) LDAP Integration.

And I forgot about squashing :)

All I say: it is expected. Gitlab is capable, just not in all editions
So will Facebook take legal action against these companies who violated their service agreement?
It's hard to make time symmetry (and thus conservation of energy) "disappear", though.
I appreciate your open mind. Here's a balanced and well researched article from a farmer if you want to read more: https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2017/02/14/without-glypho....
It is, but a lot of people want that instead of a desktop and the work necessary to maintain that. I don't think my toaster is crappy just because it can only make toast even though I could use an oven which has more capabilities
With videos featuring generated stars.

Yeah, it's been a sci fi trope for decades, but it's coming.
Development on the MS side was just fine in the 90s for many people. If you were an open source developer in the 90s, maybe not, but then again, OSS in the 90s was pretty broken for _everyone_.
We're using gitlab and are quite happy with it. Of course we migrated from an internal git hosted solution, so having a web based anything is novel. We did take the opportunity to re-gigger our code base. Git is great but its not supper at having nested Git repos...

What is surprising is that one of the younger members of our team really equated "Git" with "GitHub". I think the brand is so strong, but now "Github" by microsoft makes clear github is not git..
Algo Trading News Headlines 6/4/2018
WhatsApp and a number of Apple and Google aquisitions comes to mind in addition to Microsofts own Skype.

(Although, IIRC except for WhatsApp most of these didn't make many promises.)
A Two Months Review
> You were implying, with your statement, that her gender was relevant. It wasn't.

No. You read intent where there was none.

> There's no other way to interpret that there.

Well clearly there is because it's not my comments getting down-voted to oblivion.
Git is already open source. What does this do differently than Git?
Just curious - how do you manage bills/finances?
https://github.com/natfriedman 0 contribution. Sad.
Thanks for the insights! Miguel had Visa issues if I remember it right and could not get a job because of this.
we'd have to carry our own internal fork of Gitlab

So you have the choice between buying Gitlab or coding yourself. You would prefer it to be free and without hassle, but lack to see everything has a cost.
Long live the Gates?
Same thing here! I thought I had gone crazy until I started interacting with more more people online that had the same exact problem. Honestly, it became an obsession to figure out for me because I started feeling stupid not being able to figure it out...turns out there was no way out of this corner case!

Microsoft bought Skype in May 2011 for $8.5 billion. Think about the magnitude of dysfunction for a post-merger integration to only partially succeed despite this price tag!
But git has always has been, and still is open source. Of course, Fossil has some advantages but claiming the OS high ground shouldn't be one.
Even that's not enough to save you in general. JSON deliberately (!) permits duplicate keys. It leaves it up to the implementation to decide how to handle them.

And there are two (sensible) ways to add key/value pairs to a map: either keep the first occurrence of key X, or the last occurrence of key X.

Some JSON libraries pick one way; others pick the other.

Getting the two to interoperate is, as we see, not easy.

It would have been better for JSON to forbid duplicate keys, or to specify a mandatory first-wins or last-wins policy. Then there'd be no room for error.
Because it is the business interest to get people using Azure, how do you think this will effect Github?
Remember, these costs add up quite easy. Why bother if I can get the same features for free?

But it really depends on how you view it. I felt I got better value by supporting an open source project I like on patreon (Godot) than spending my money on this subscription.
You must be proud of Nat :)
"Hey, I don't want to work on this anymore. I can't afford it."
The human scalability of “DevOps”
> The most recent review on this subject reported that only 50% of all trials registered with authorities such as the United States’ Food and Drug Administration (FDA) make their results available.

Wow, that is really bad sounding. While not all, I would assume large portion of those studies are funded by companies and groups who find results in conflict with their goals and don't want news to get out.
fossil doesn't only version control the source code. other project-meta like wiki and issues are also replicated when you clone a fossil repo.
> promise changes and do an apology tour in response to any regulatory or public backlash after it happens

Except they aren't apologizing for this. And they shouldn't, it's a non-issue. The next article is going to be about how facebook shares user's data with third parties (chrome/firefox/opera/nefarious browser #3/etc) without any sort of agreement about how those third parties use the data.
Agree. I for one am excited about the future of GitHub under Microsoft. Happy for Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, Mark Otto and all the early employees.

It is sad that Hacker News, once a community for hungry entrepreneurs has digressed into a hipster, anti-corporate, anti-capitalism community.
Intelligent Tracking Prevention 2.0
No sir, I do not. And I'd rather not have to.
Yeah, but they are not 40 years old interviewing and writing blogposts now. anyway, it's a lame thing to say, as nobody cares when you started "coding". what do you want to achieve by saying that phrase?
Atlassian naturally.
That seems to be part of the $4 / mo / user subscription. A server to self-host costs $100-$500 / mo, so it doesn't seem like an impossible obstacle with < 100 users.

What fee structure would work for you? Maybe per-installation or per-repo?
What is so negative about LinkedIn?
This feels off to me. Einstein’s process did not come from the mathematics, but from an idea of what was happening. This enabled a great number of odd predictions which were verified (the Sun would bend the visible pathway of a star, there would be gravitational waves, etc...). String Theory feels like a theory which is starting at the wrong place. Not an idea of what process is happening and then seeing if the results fit, but an attempt to connect all the results into a theory. Pas bien por moi!
Still a million daily users and 500,000 projects. You can say it's dead because you don't use it, but we're just focused on doing right by them.
>How do you prove that Bob leaked the information? How do you prove that Abe told Bob?

Data watermarks, small changes (little tiny bits) that allows to track the leaks.

Also audit logs, you know who has what, etc. The topic has been hotly discussed with GDPR as the leaks have rather harsh consequences (beside being dragged through the mud, erm newspapers).
OP is obviously editorializing, that isn't the title of the linked document.
Is this supposed to be a response to the github acquisition? github != git.
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker.

This has changed how I approach sleep.