skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You'll have to justify this: "Prior studies were riddled with inadequacies in controlling for confounders and outright methodological errors."

Your recent study is pay walled, so I can only go by the abstract, but it doesn't sound any more rigorous to me.

I also find its comparing very different things. It says bugs in release, but it sounds like they consider commits to be releases, which would be very unfortunate.

Its also specifically targeting JavaScript, which prior study already showed to be one of the poorest performers in terms of defects (i.e., it tends to have more). For example, it would be interesting to know how many bugs were due to weak typing.

I'm also curious, adding the typed annotations should be a blind activity to be rigorous. Was it? Or did they knew there was a bug and what the bug was then they added the type info?

I also feel they're doing a one way comparison, having to add types can introduce other forms of bugs, but since this study is targeted, I find it to suffer a little from confirmation bias. Like type checker detects type errors, is a bit of a no brainer conclusion. I understand they mean this in the sense that 15% of bugs were type errors. But that doesn't mean TypeScript code would have 15% less bugs, because they did it one way only. It could introduce other bugs in the process.

Would have been interesting too to analyse how long it took for the bug fix commit to be made over the introduction of the bug. So you would know the real cost of them. Which is important, since annotating adds dev time, but so does big fixing. Would be nice to have time data.

Finally, the prior study demonstrate the same outcome. That static tends to have lower defect rate then dynamic and functional less then imperative. The difference is in the outliers. Clojure and Ruby were both outliers that outdid almost all static languages.

So actually, it would be great to reapply your study to them. Clojure has an optional type checker already so it could be a good one. It was also the strongest outlier.
That's odd. If you think GitHub was trustworthy before and it isn't anymore now, you've been proven wrong, because your dear GitHub has just sold you to Microsoft.
Uh, yes. Cause the premise of this article was why we as modern people we should appreciate Aristotle's reflections on happiness, not why I should appreciate the meticulous perfection of the internal logic of his world view.

In my opinion, either Aristotle should've broadened his view of "virtue" or "happiness" to not worry so much about personal weakness or vice. Or his notion of these aren't really worth taking up as a modern measure against one's life.
It was a pleasure but gitlab and bitbucket have continued to improve and I've expected some sort of exit for a while. I appreciate everything the Github team has done, but barring some crazy improvements from Microsoft I think my feet are firmly planted on the GitLab train.
If you deliberately loaded a single round into a revolver, spun the cylinder and then put the gun against your neighbors head and pulled the trigger, would that not be murder in the 1-in-6 chance that your neighbors brains were blown out? Wouldn't you be a murderer for even playing that 'game', despite the stochastic nature of it?
That indiana jones theme whistling to organ was hilariously awful -> https://youtu.be/vdxCqNWTpUs?t=124 . Though I guess you can blame a lot of that on how bad the whistling was in the first place.

But I would totally play with this if given the chance. I don't foresee this tech replacing human composition for pop music, as one comment here expects, but it will be a tool for musicians in the same way that auto-tune became it's own sort of sound/style. I definitely can see it being useful for prototyping arrangements for instruments that you can't play (or don't keep around).
> In the extreme that means you won't be able to log in to facebook on the web, only via a facebook app

Taking that even further, if you really want to avoid the need to trust anyone, you'd need to run an operating system created by Facebook running on hardware created by Facebook. Otherwise, the OS and hardware vendors of course have access to your personal data. I guess it's all a spectrum, and certain hardware/software vendors you just need to trust (or at least assign blame to them, not Facebook, if they maliciously steal your data).
NYT: #Facebook #APIs gave device makers deep access to user data. FB disagrees
Tech in Canada- Toronto vs. Vancouver
Looking for a tech job in Canada, which is the best city to move in- in terms of payscale, standard of living, amenities and in general tech scenario.
It is certainly not in compliant with Open Source Initiative's definition, which is the primary meaning
of open source in the engineering field.
https://opensource.org/osd

Their license says...

Notwithstanding the foregoing, you may copy and modify
the Software for development and testing purposes, without requiring a
subscription. You agree that GitLab and/or its licensors (as applicable) retain
all right, title and interest in and to all such modifications. You are not
granted any other rights beyond what is expressly stated herein. Subject to the
foregoing, it is forbidden to copy, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense,
and/or sell the Software.
GitLab servers are very, very slow today.
> For as long as he is alive, he will have less range of motion in his right wrist than his left, barring advances in nanotechnology bone reconstruction or something.

If that is his attitude - and the attitude of everyone around him - then that will likely be the case.

In 'reality' - whatever that means to you - plenty of folks have demonstrated that the body is malleable.

With work, ROM is restorable.
Thinking Notebook and Markdown IDE
In general I have sympathy for the free core + pay for enterprise features approach. Seems like a fair model. Where it starts to fall apart for me, is when basic quality of life features like a usable code review (do not trigger a notification for every line I comment) are tagged as “enterprise features”.
> RedHat is the ONLY company managing a reasonable revenue stream while being fully open source

For their size. There are other open source projects that are actually profitable. They're just not billion dollar companies. e.g. ghost.org
Surely the 'allows remote' column is redundant?
It used to be really hard to find free chemical information online. I remember this site was one of the few back in the 90s that had anything on the topic.

Chemistry was dragged, kicking and screaming, into the Internet Age. The field is still a laggard. As evidence, consider the aversion of chemists as a group to preprint servers and their over-reliance on paywalled journals with hypervigilant exclusivity policies.

Glad to see Molecule of the Month hasn't changed style in many years.
My impression is that in the U.S., a lot of people's knowledge about Bayer stops with Bayer Aspirin. For which they used to run sets of very comforting advertisements. I recall particularly some of the older TV advertisements. You're sick? OMG, your child's sick? Bayer, or Bayer "Baby" Aspirin, is going to make it better.

I'm a bit older, and maybe things have changed, since. But the Bayer public image in the U.S. used to be pretty benign.

I'm not sure they can fool anyone, though, trying to "hide" Monsanto under it.
>My name is Nat and I’ve been a developer since I was six

Oh come on give me a break
To give benefit-of-the-doubt, I think they believe their own propaganda. Facebook folks actually believed that (e.g. among many) pushing people to reveal all aspects of their life equally to everyone was in society's best interest.

And I once met a Facebook employee who actually was a staunch EFF supporter…

But overall, I dunno… you're probably right.
Nvidia new embeded GPU platform for deep learning
"Open core" is just plain ol' proprietary software. Mac OS X is "open core" in the very literal sense that kernel and core are synonyms. It's really no big innovation to be selling secret sauce on top of free software; Android is also "open core" as is Matlab. Nowadays literally almost all proprietary software has bits of weakly-licensed free software in it such as curl or React.

I've never been very impressed by GitLab's claims of openness. The only difference seems to be that you can get most of the useful things of GitLab as free software whereas Darwin, Linux, or LAPACK+FFTW are not the most attractive parts of macOS, Android, or Matlab.

Call me when you manage to make a business without forcing any kind of EULA whatsoever on your customers. That will be the real innovation.
An Introduction to Axioms with Set Theory for 10 Years Old
Nvidia Jetson Xavier
I'm glad they're doing this. If anything the only ones misbehaving are the skeptics making claims they'll likely be disproved over. Also has been noted if they had issues with this happening they should of never used GitHub to begin with. I guess devs are religious about git hosting platforms aside from text editors and programming languages.
> If you like/love GitLab/GitHub, you'll want the companies behind them to thrive financially, to continue offering their products to you at reasonable prices for the immense value they offer to your workflow

I don't like/love GitLab or GitHub in an emotional sense. They're good tools, but they're tools.

Bitkeeper was also a very good tool, offering immense value compared to any of the other options there, and the effective death of Bitkeeper and the existence of Git was an incredibly good thing for both the world as a whole and my personal workflow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitKeeper
"Check the Monsanto Wikipedia page for more details, but the short version is that Monsanto patented its genetically engineered seeds and then sued farmers for patent infringement if they were found to be growing crops from that seed without a license."

This is precisely the hysteria and conspiracy theory I am referring to.

Short answer: it's fake.

Longer answer: The farmers you reference intentionally stole seed, they never purchased it, and they indended to use and grow it. A farmer does not have a little seed blow in and magically entire field after field after field is perfectly planted. They stole, it is what it is.

This is precisely why they should change their name. Even here in a supposedly intellectual forum, vapid nonsense is passed off as fact.

P.S. had you visited Monsanto's wikipedia page, as you instruct others to, you would have been cured of your conspiracy. Here's your link, btw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_legal_cases#As_plaint...

" That said, Monsanto has stated it will not "exercise its patent rights where trace amounts of our patented seed or traits are present in farmer's fields as a result of inadvertent means."[15] The Federal Circuit found that this assurance is binding on Monsanto, so that farmers who do not harvest more than a trace amount of Monsanto's patented crops "lack an essential element of standing" to challenge Monsanto's patents"

"The usual claim involves patent infringement due to intentionally replanting patented seed. Such activity was unanimously found by the United States Supreme Court to constitute patent infringement in Bowman v. Monsanto Co. (2013)"

AKA it's only an issue when a farmer intentionally replants entire fields of seeds and has nothing to do with "blowing seeds" or trace amounts or any accidents or acts of nature.

Oops!

In Canada, a similar incident occurred where a farmer had an incidental amount of Monsanto seed blow in, and then he isolated it from other varieties and reproduced his own copies of Monsanto seeds to fill all of his fields with his copies of their seeds, and again, he stole from them. He intentionally filled his fields with seeds he knew he wasn't supposed to have (or argued wrongly that he could have).
They could start with making Skype not lag horrendously while TYPING. Or better yet, put out a native client again.

Dreams...
>The Colorado Court of Appeals ruled that Mr. Phillips’s free speech rights had not been violated, noting that the couple had not discussed the cake’s design before Mr. Phillips turned them down.

That's indeed exactly what the article says.

>They were buying a wedding cake, and were denied before any design was discussed.
Agreed, it's way too early to pull out the pitchforks until they've had time to demonstrate their sincerity on tackling these issues (and failed).
I like the thought process here (looking at aggregates), but this analysis is simplified to the point of uselessness. For example, since you are talking about houses I think the relevant quantity is average wealth per household. The average household size in the UK was 2.3 in 2011 [1], so that's £395,600 / household, reversing your conclusions.

I'm sure other considerations could push the results in both directions. To draw any conclusions from this type of analysis, one needs to think much more carefully about this question than either of us have done. Surely there must be economists who spend their careers addressing these types of questions?

[1]: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...
The power of need, of choice, and of free in sales
I’ve seen many acquisitions commit to 2) only to slowly walk back from that “in the interests of operational efficiencies”. And next thing you know you have to change over to using a Microsoft account to log in...
The military has been involved in back-channel funding of video game development for 10-15 years now. Every triple-a shooter title out there has a team of active duty military members in the credits. They make for excellent recruitment tools.

For better or worse, entertainment shapes public policy. So it's no surprise that the government gets involved.
iOS 12 CarPlay Is Getting Google Maps and Waze
I mean... this mostly just feels like the originals were fed through some sort of vocoder... None of this is impressive at all to me. Translate orchestral output to hip hop or something and then I'll be impressed. At this point, you've fed one song in and output some kind of grainy sounding similar sound that is basically just triggering notes in a vocoder...
‪“Your Company’s Culture Is Who You Hire, Fire, and Promote”
> Facebook has acted on this and intentionally made hundreds of thousands of people fall into a depression, just to see if they could, and then they bragged about it.

No, they did not. They adjusted the proportion of positive emotional expressions and negative emotional expressions in users' news feeds in order to test for an association between that proportion and emotional expressions in users' posts. There are serious problems with what they did, but "intentionally made hundreds of thousands of people fall into a depression" is late-Slashdot style trolling.

http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/111/24/8788.full.pdf
The Life and Times of the Literary Agent Georges Borchardt
Bookmarked for future reference. It's super important to remember that every company's behaviors reflect their incentive structure, not their mission statement.
Is there any discussion on why Stripe chose to write so much code in Ruby? I would have thought for financial software where subtle bugs can have a huge impact you would want to opt for a language with static checks. Or maybe only a small part of the codebase requires this?
The break-things part is related to the startup meme of disruption too. And as some critic I read once said, many startups disrupt business status quo in the same way that I disrupt the idea of pet-ownership if I steal your dog.
What? You didn’t code when you were three?
Okay, who pays as well?
I was in the room at the Paris Solutions Linux when Nat did one of the first demos of compiz and XGL. It was a weird feeling because it started as a demo of benign desktop features, and it slowly transitioned to the awesome window transitions we've all come to know. Like many technological advancements, its effect on the short term had been largely overestimated (the fancy animation, transparent windows and cube desktop are almost forgotten), while in the long term, it was the first of many steps in the modernizing of the Linux graphics stack.

I have nothing relevant to add, since I don't really know Nat or how good he'd be leading Github (but I'd guess pretty good), I just thought it was a fun anectdote.
I use MySQLdump, tar, and sftp to store the files I need on another server. I know everyone's needs are different, but I would avoid any type of 3rd party/complex backup system. If you have to install some tool to restore your backup, you run the possibility of that tool becoming unavailable, or incompatible with your backups. Sticking to tools that have been around for a long time, and have multiple implementations mitigates that as a concern.
The main platform where open source takes place is now owned by a company that thought of open source as a form of cancer, vocally talked against it in a disrespectful manner for no reason, promoted fear/uncertainty/doubt campaigns, and even to this day continues to troll companies with patents.

That is not a great place to be in.

Personally, I think everyone should just move their projects somewhere else before Microsoft starts forcibly herding developers their way.
I really can't think of a better large tech company to buy GitHub (Which has been closed sourced since creation and I don't know why people are so scared). Now Oracle would make me put on my tin foil hat on immediately and deleting of my account.
I think at some point you might absolve the present-day organizations of the sins of their predecessors - organizations, corporations, families, countries are made of people, and the moral responsibility ultimately lies with the individuals who choose to act, to not act, or to allow others to do so.

But it's also the case that an organizations future is based in its past; even if the individual people who chose to act have long since died and there are none alive who know their face or name, if a group of people (an organization, a country, a corporation) has enriched itself through immoral acts in the past, even if it acts morally today, is it right to leave them with the fruits of its crimes? If a people has been impoverished by crimes committed against them in the past, even if no one today is still wronging them, is it right to leave them impoverished today?
I wouldn't be worried about BlackBerry, it's Samsung. I will never use their phones again with their fingers over every part of the Android pie.
Eta v0.8 - REPL and Metaprogramming
> Signed agreements do not prevent your information from being used in other ways. That's insane, literally.

Yes but just two sentences later in the post...

> And our partnership and engineering teams approved the Facebook experiences these companies built.

They're saying they inspected these apps. You jumped to "literally insane" so fast there.
My primary concern is that I worry about an inevitable merging or linking with LinkedIn. As positive as my experience has been interacting with GitHub, it's been equally as negative interacting with LinkedIn. I worry that MS will see GitHub as the code management platform, and LinkedIn as the customer management platform.

It's important to me that my GitHub account and my LinkedIn account are allowed to be 100% separate. I don't want people able to hunt me down like that.
Thanks. I skimmed GGP's comment and assumed it said something slightly more correct than what it actually said and then copy-pasted his error.

> Even with the mitigations provided by moving away from MD5, simple integration with a CA would be much more strategically beneficial.

Returning to the point, this attack would be unaffected by Microsoft purchasing anything.
I think this is a case of "it doesn't look good, but the more you think about it the less bad it looks." There's a kernel of truth in the unfortunate wording. GPL (certain versions) is problematic if you want to keep your related code closed source. When I interned at Microsoft, you had to get approval from legal to use open sourced code specifically for copyright liability reasons.

I'm sure Ballmer also disliked Linux for other reasons, but this line makes for an ambiguous example of it.

Given that Microsoft has been pretty enthusiastic about tools like VSCode and Linux support on Azure, I'm personally cautiously optimistic with Nadella at the helm.
Because most of the open source world is more than happy to use that closed-source service.
My bad. I usually try not to do _exactly the thing I did_, rage-pasting a link without reading it fully.

I'm not going to get into a deep back and forth over this, but nothing I am aware of shows spanking of any sort has good long term effects on behavior and pretty much every piece of literature out there points to corporal punishment being effective for getting a kid to cease acting out, but either ineffective or worse for long term behavior changes.

And sure, maybe being super calm and measured with your application of corporal punishment will prevent it from doing damage. Just seems like a strange path to take when there are effective ones out there that don't require violence or the threat of violence against children.
Woah, what? The current version?
Exactly, that phrase is so used right now. Meaningless and douchey.
Instead of hollow frustration, you should try explaining what your actual issue with that is.
> Solar & wind have already over taken nuclear.

Solar and wind have rapidly come down in price, which is awesome. However, due to their variable nature, they do suffer from the problem of declining value as their grid penetration increases.

So there is a place for dispatchable capacity. If your country has enough dispatchable renewables like hydro or geothermal, awesome. If not, there's not that many good options. Nuclear, and maybe fossil and/or biofuels (in general, I'm very skeptical wrt large-scale biofule use, so this ought to be very limited) with CCS. Batteries and demand shifting are good for short-term bursts, and will likely replace gas in that role, but for large scale shifting they are way too expensive.

I'm very much a fan of the work Jesse Jenkins is doing in power systems modeling, see e.g.

https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/events/getting-zero-pathway...

> Even so, we need to eliminate stockpiles, waste. Traveling wave reactors (TWR) seems like the best technical bet. Maybe we'd get some electricity out of it.

Last I read, the company behind the TWR (TerraPower) is mostly focusing on a fast spectrum molten salt reactor nowadays. Which is cool, I'm a big fan of the fast MSR as a concept. That being said, while breeding would allow us to increase the utilization of nuclear fuel by about two orders of magnitude, at the moment uranium is so cheap that it's not seen as economically worthwhile.

But, if nuclear is going to play a major role in the world's energy supply, breeders will eventually be necessary. So I do think we should develop them.

> (I'm not clear why we don't drop radioactive waste onto the Marianas Trench and let the earth eventually devour it.)

The waste problem is more political than technical. Burying the waste deep in bedrock is perfectly good.
'New' tall thin young white guy face of the company. Why the picture? Transparent pandering. Welcome to MSFT.
> You can do all that assuming you have a license for your production users. It's not GNU-style Free Software, sure, but it still feels like Open Source to me.

I disagree. If you need a paid license in order to redistribute modified copies, that's really not how developers think of open source and it seems disingenuous to conflate the two meanings. It definitely does not "feel" open source.

Even Microsoft understood this difference, which is why back in the day (before current Microsoft practices) they used to have an initiative called "Shared Source" [0]. Notice how they avoided calling it "open source", since this would have contradicted reasonable expectations about the meaning of the term.

----

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_source