skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Has anyone (DigitalOcean, Github or others) run numbers on what percentage of casual users are converted into persistent open-source contributors while initially being incentivized by Hacktoberfest? Sure spam is and always will be a problem, but if that first number is significant (of course that's a big if) then it makes sense to encourage this effort by putting in some moderation overtime. As I mentioned elsewhere in the thread I'd very gladly sift through a mountain of spam if it meant getting another reliable maintainer or two for my project.
Oh you're right! I was reading on my phone and bucketed that picture as a link to the other blog posts like the carousel at the bottom and mentally skipped it. My mistake!
I'm not 100% sure, but I think there are also data retention limits and opt-out requirements as part of that act. Some states have stricter rules as well.
Here is the original post with comments:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190108095105/https://blogs.msd...
Government Is Losing the Trust of the People – California Globe
WOW! I have had a wildly different experience. Really sorry to see that it has caused you so much stress.

I run engineering at Operation Code
https://operationcode.org/
https://github.com/operationcode/

We've been massive fans of Hacktoberfest for the last 3 years because it has brought a MINIMUM 300% increase in quality pull requests compared to even the next best month of the year.

I even put my own money on the line to double down on the incentives with extra prizes in exchange for resolving multiple issues. I've made friends and long-term coding partners from the event as well.

I hope they never end Hacktoberfest, but I think they should definitely offer the ability for you to signal/flag that you're not interested in participating as a repository.
> Finally, and most importantly, we can remember that this is how DigitalOcean treats the open source maintainer community, and stay away from their products going forward. Although we’ve enjoyed using them for hosting the WHATWG standards organization, this kind of behavior is not something we want to support, so we’re starting to investigate alternatives.

> Another promising route would be if GitHub would cut off DigitalOcean’s API access

I am pretty sure DigitalOcean is not doing this in bad faith or try to damage open source community but the author seems to be out for blood for what seems to be an oversight on the part of DigitalOcean, suggesting that this is a how DigitalOcean treats open source community and one should boycott their products.
Their FAQ (linked from the submitted article) says:

>[...] please give them an `invalid` or `spam` label and close them. Pull requests that contain a label with the word `invalid` or `spam` won’t be counted toward Hacktoberfest.
It's SQL, if they were giving wrong answers people would notice.
"Video unavailable
This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Microsoft Corporation."
I've seen a repo where anybody who commited a change (via a merged PR) got added as contributor to the project automatically. That could be target.
In curricula yes, you have to take calculus courses first. And yes, maybe in some esoteric proofs you need it. But in real, useful statistics, that is actually analyzing data to see if it is statistically significant, calculus plays no role at all.
Influencers are so valuable per hour that I doubt there is any real estate on their social media pages for organic content that hasn't already been paid for.
Unfortunately I think that's the current state of things. It takes a lot of work to get any semblance of the truth, and even then it's extremely localized.

IMHO, C19 was WAY more politicized than it should have been, which caused a lot of the misinformation.

For me to be less despaired, I give up on things like national news (or severely limit it), and hang around positive people, particularly ones doing good things in the community. There are still good people out there doing great things.

I don't think that the media portrayal of many things is a realistic view of reality in most places.
Lit-Element puts lipstick on the low level pig, but React excels in many ways beyond it. Consistency between props (vs attributes), can render server side, awesome side effect system that makes it world class at hmr.

I think WebComponents have left a horrible taste in the mouth because they came well after React and others existed, didn’t take any inspiration or provide any abstractions that would help, did basically everything worse and seemingly without any discussion with real world devs, and then were hyped and pushed on everyone for years while they basically lacked all necessary features. Now, years later they have evolved and added libraries on top to smooth over all the weirdness, and if you squint they look similar, but the web would have been a better place if they had just provided some VDOM abstractions, style containment in a simple way, and so on rather than master-planned a High Modernist dystopia and then slowly painted over it until it resembled something like the organic cities that already existed.
The True Impact of Human Expertise on Your Perimeter
There are many instances for Fractional, but the resultant type of the (/) operator is always the same as the operands:

GHCI> :i (/)
class Num a => Fractional a where
(/) :: a -> a -> a
...
-- Defined in ‘GHC.Real’
infixl 7 /

The key is that integer types aren't Fractional, so the Haskell 2010 defaulting rules[1] cause the literals to be interpreted as Double. With an appropriate default declaration GHC could have picked Ratio Integer, Complex Double, etc. instead, but without one Integer and Double are the only options and Integer wouldn't satisfy the constraints.

[1] https://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/haskell2010/haskellch4....
I'm not 100% sure if it was intentional, but there was a span of time when AT&T's customer service queue (for land lines) behaved like this. You'd call in, your call would be placed on hold (with their terrible hold music), then if you hung up it would call you back when an agent answered your call. I only discovered this behaviour because one day I was fed up with waiting, hung up the phone, and then an hour or so later got the call back. Repeated this a couple times after that call and it worked the same way. I have no idea if that ever worked for their cellular accounts, or if it was peculiar to their land lines.
I might buy a pixel 5 just for this feature...I waited 30 min on the line for just to make a doctor appointment recently. Wait time are fucking absurd for some of these services since Covid, especially with banks and medical offices.
Had the same problem. The solution seemed to be a stronger WIFI signal. Adding an extension cable to move the chromecast further away from the TV prevents the tv from blocking signals.
I am far from a Microsoft zealot.
But this is damn awesome.
>Why is this news?

Because the more general public (for a certain degree of generality) apparently didn't know about this until this week. Usenet is now seen mostly as a device for good ol' piracy.
I think deaths is the real metric to follow, and this curve shows the development I described: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...
Maybe they should either just give you a t-shirt on sign up or not give a t-shirt at all but prizes to the best contributions or something like that. I'm unconvinced that the prospect of getting a t-shirt would incentivize someone to put a lot of effort in a contribution. I feel like people who do put in the effort would do it regardless of the t-shirt.
That’s great, thanks for the links.
Nvidia has DLSS upscaling, remote play to a PC with a GeForce graphics card, and generally faster hardware.

I think for 99% of people though this new Google dongle will do everything they need but cheaper.
In addition to the reasons given in peer comments, minimising exposure helps to protect other people.

Personally that's my main motivation to stay in and take care. Not to protect myself, but to protect other people.

Including people I know and care about personally, and people I don't know and never will.

Some of those other people will die or live with a horrible disability which may be lifelong, if me and people like me don't collectively adopt that stance.

That's a great reason for me to stay in, be careful, and minimise exposure!

So I do it voluntarily and gladly, and wish others would make the same decision, and when they can't for reasons outside their control, wish that they could if they want to.
The author of pijul is of the opinion that cherry-picks only work in accordance with the developer's mental model, if the VCS is based on patches.

I've been persuaded by his argument, and I'm really looking forward to the pijul rewrite landing, so I can play around with it again.
Neat, a useful feature that I'd like to see on iOS too. I typically just put the call on speaker-phone and go about my work.
In the new world, signing up for anything is instantaneous, but opting out takes hours of hold music. It's easy: if it costs you money, it's quick and easy. If it costs the company money, it will be like pulling teeth.

Incorrect health insurance bill? Waste a few hours of your time and we'll fix it! Want to disconnect your $10/mo subscription? Talk to you tomorrow, so long as you don't hang up!
I would love to see more talk from companies about how to foster meaningful contribution instead of focusing on measurable contribution.

I recently read "Working in Public" which was great, I recommend it. One interesting observation that was made: The perceived pipeline of user => casual contributor => active contributor => maintainer...is a lie. In the book they argue (convincingly) that you do not convert someone from casually contributing to actively contributing, it's instead that active contributors also make casual contributions.

What does that mean in this context? This company is operating under the assumption that they are helping by getting more people into the pipeline. In reality, what we need are active contributors who are invested in projects, not fly-by-night-i-want-a-shirt contributors.

For context I maintain https://www.CodeTriage.com which is a community of about 55,000 devs interested in open-source.
... and hello to forgetting why you were on the phone in the first place.

User calls financial institution, user is put on hold, user invokes "goodbye to hold music" feature, user goes on with their life and regains time, user forgets they are on hold and goes to the bathroom... you can see where this is going.
I suspect msft provides sources (for audit) to governments all over the world if they want the contract.
> But in general, Golden seems to have a very strong tech bias - which is fine, but limits what it can be used for.

Today, yes, but not necessarily in the future. Facebook started on elite college campuses, built its network, and expanded.
Writing inline styles != rendering inline styles, look at “atomic style extraction” which with a compile step gives you far better results: automatic dead code elimination, automatic partial loading that’s tied directly to your usage, and no more jumping between the thing you’re styling and the the thing itself.

The nitpicks you have on Twitter are on specific behaviors (video and jumping and slow fetch) that have nothing to do with React. The site itself is lightweight and runs fast.
That gist looks interesting. You said it is from cosmopolitan, I assume it has the same license as it. Thinking about toying with that defer implementation. Looks fun.

Though I still do it all manually, and am looking for ways to automate it.
I really wouldn't. I'm not a minimalist by any means but I've been decluttering for a while and am certainly long past the point where I'll tolerate having possessions that I don't want. Maybe this is a privileged point of view but, as with swag in general, most vendor t-shirts are honestly just tat.
It looks the same as Apple’s tvOS.

Someone ran the photocopier on their competition.
People pay to activate windows 10 which is 3x the price.
There are very few things in my life where I’ve purchased the highest-features version. I have a regular Medeco lock on my house instead of a Smart Lock. I didn’t give my TV internet access so it acts as a “dumb TV.” I own two kitchen knives instead of a set with a knife for every single scenario. Instead of the fancy closet organizers I have a regular bar and a set of shelves. Phones are no different — I rarely prefer the one with the most “stuff,” I like the thing that has the best execution on the stuff it has.
Huh, does he think he's funny? Spamming the Linux kernel git seems like a good way to be considered a major wanker. And doing it from a non-throwaway Github account?
That sounds like a bug!

Easter egg to me is a flight simulator in Excel or pinball in word etc.!
I can chromecast youtube to my TV already.

I have firetv dongle(two of them) that can run youtube too.

Roku is also pretty popular in this space.

Some also uses apple tv(not an Apple fan here)

what google tv buy me? what's its unique selling point? that was not very clear to me.
A snapshot of one year's participation in that specific period isn't too relevant to what we are discussing, because it doesn't track sustained future contributions by those same users.
DigitalOcean isn't intentionally damaging the open source community - they are just indifferent to the harm they're causing. They are fully aware of the spam problem and refuse to take measures to fix it because it would be too much work for them: https://twitter.com/MattIPv4/status/1311391587793014784

That's not an "oversight".
ARM implementation would be fun to look at as well.
The 1080p60 bug can be fixed by cutting the plastic lid off the Chromecast and adding a fan.
Practice your Svelte skills during Hacktoberfest
Yes, absolutely! In the case of Arm, it would need to be a pure macro (i.e. no external __defer function) since ARM ABI uses a register to store the return address. Then the unwind code would need to save the return registers x0 to x7 each time it calls free() or whatever function is being deferred. I'd write it for you, but I don't use ARM.
Tesla Tire Costs 10× Battery Cost, & My Plan to Deflate Tire Costs 90%
What you're saying makes perfect sense - no complaint or disagreement from me - but I'm still struggling to wrap my mind around this because when all's said and done we're still talking about a vendor t-shirt, and how cool can that really be?

If it does motivate people and they like them, then fine: I guess it's just different strokes for different folks.
In lighthouse, I see a score of 100 performance and time to interactive at 1.8secs.

This is comparable to hacker news home page (which is purely static), but my first contentful paint was slightly faster (probably because my site is slightly smaller).

Both sites were about 4 times faster (TTI) than google home page and typescript home page.
Please, please fix the years-old notification bug where you can't turn off email notifications for every single comment without leaving the channel.

"Only email me when I'm mentioned" actually emails you for every message instead.
Incidentally, a bunch of people outside Microsoft had access to these tools (e.g. academics).
That's totally normal I would say. Once you have repo with a few thousand stars there will also be occasional spam requests from what I guess are people that want to be able to pin the repo to their profile. Can't imagine dealing with the spam that the post is describing.
It’s not about the price in USD, it’s about the price in CO2 production and human suffering from mining and manufacturing.
not that I can tell; I was wondering the same thing.
Maybe tell legitimate pull requesters to add a special keyword to not be tagged as spam. Something like "digital ocean is pants": http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/hereford/worcs/75...
I'm not sure "worse is better" is specifically an argument, but it seems to be a decent signal for survival and even broad market success.

Like, if you don't need the most compact and fastest possible serialization, isn't there some benefit in text / human-readable messages? There are lots of tools for dealing with text--searching, filtering, categorizing, and so on. It seems to me that most projects never get close to the point of real suffering due to inefficient serialization, or even due to mushy schema.

Look at Javascript: a terrible language, but very broadly available, and sort of easy to pick up.
Since project maintainers don't have to opt in to Hacktoberfest, there's no reason for them to know that the FAQ exists. Most maintainers are unaware of what's going on and will just close the spammy PRs without tagging them.
The whole product reminds me a lot about the Braun T52.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=braun+t52&iax=images&ia=images
Potentially the issue may have more traction now:
https://twitter.com/MattIPv4/status/1311421301291200512
Is there a npm package or a "component" you can drop in a website's source with some config that would allow you to block off anything that's not on the configured "allow-list"? Sounds like a "privacy badger" or "uBlock" of the web-app could be a neat thing
Uber is still not making profits. So where is this money coming from?

You can't raise prices and expect the same level of demand from consumers. So once demand goes down, the # of drivers needed will go down.

So you raise prices by restricting supply of drivers. It's not that complicated. Uber is not keeping prices low as part of some scheme to rip off drivers and hoard profits in some bank vault like a cartoon villain - they're what the supply / demand of the market dictate.

If you disagree, I'm happy to look at concrete data to change my mind.
Probably more than half the companies I've been on hold with interrupt their hold music with periodic recorded voice announcements (e.g. music music "Try our new flavor of Ovaltine!" music music). Event with a hands-free phone, this is probably the worst possible hold experience.
The notion that computational reducibility is the key principle underpinning difficulty in life (and probably social) sciences is extremely insightful, and had me optimistic for the second half.

But the author's suggestion to address this problem is just... to chase the combinatorial explosion harder? That's a pretty underwhelming solution. And impossible cost scaling aside, another key part of the problem is that we don't even know how to enumerate what the relevant parameters are. What about the effects of a mouse's environment on natural immune response and drug efficacy, for example? Such a highly roboticized environment would be highly unpleasant for a mouse, presumably, and adverse effects seem well within the realm of possibility.
I'm wondering why they didn't just copy the open source German Corona app that had a security audit and works the exact same way.

That way we could trace contacts in two countries that border on each other. The more countries we get in the same app, the better.
High quality plain t-shirts are $6 in bulk.

Why would you save $6 to turn yourself into an unpaid walking billboard for someone else?

To me, wearing clothes with logos or names on them that depict a company or brand that you don’t personally own is the ultimate low-status move.
The Air Horner
If anyone here is giving, don't forget to check if your employer provides a matching fund. Many large companies do, so you can effectively double your donation.
That's exactly what it is. I worked at IBM many moons ago, and at one point was asked to create a list of job requirements that would ensure I was provably the only person in the world who met the constraints. Big companies are weird, man.
I am ecstatic. The Element Android client is quite good and getting better, and I'd love to be able to access gitter from that.
This isn’t a new problem. Before every phone had a speakerphone option, it was easy to put down the handset of your landline phone while waiting on hold and just check in every once in awhile. Same is true of online chat-based support.

Also you could build a feature next which asks you why you’re calling and maybe tells the agent why you’re calling before transferring/connecting you...
Some info here:

https://www.ninds.nih.gov/Disorders/Patient-Caregiver-Educat...
The Gist is now updated with an ISC license. So it's very permissive. Enjoy! Feel free to contact me anytime too, if you get interested in hacking on this stuff.
Coliving rental startup HubHaus implodes, says no funds to pay unsecured claims
My understanding is that it operates on a different level than Pip.
But isn't Society just the result of the social contract between its members? and part of that contract are the ideals and goals that the society has collectively agreed to uphold and preserve. It's the condition of admission into the society, if you will. So in fact, any organization of human beings cannot exist without some sort of judgementalism and bias, even if minimal.

I also agree reverting back into traditional notions of privacy is not an option. The only options for someone worried about the implications of mass-surveillance on their livelihood will be either to remove themselves from society altogether, or to migrate to other mass-surveilling societies where their lot there is easier to bear.
My Favorite SSH_config Settings
Have you read the pull requests? I did and I'm appalled that someone would waste maintainers time like this. It's so pointless, and for what? A t-shirt?

15 spam PRs in last two hours
https://github.com/phpmyadmin/website/pulls?q=is%3Apr

9 spam PRs in the last day
https://github.com/whatwg/html/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed+l...

Take a look at this user who has made 21 commits this year. 20 of the commits are from today and all of them are for valuable additions like:

* "made with love"

* "you will love it"

* " with "

* "Please do try we have made this for you"

* "That was amazing dud"

* "lovely i loved it"

* "and awesome"

* "and cool"

https://github.com/shibin37

EDIT: Formatting
Brands have inertia. Once your brand is big enough, you can get away with a shitty customer service and generally screwing customers over. If you aren't a total disaster of a company, then the worst that happens is that some of your customers book with another big brand the next year... but then customers who got screwed by that other brand will try their luck with you.

I'm really guessing with major travel agencies it works the same way as it seems to work with mobile operators in my country: you have three major networks to choose from, every one tries to screw you over as much as possible, but since everyone needs a smartphone, people just bounce around between the three in anger (or try to arbitrage deals). Viewed at scale, it's just an equilibrium.
The inconsistency is the worst part about the scroll linked effects on this website. Sometimes scrolling causes a huge change to the content, almost like scrolling to the next slide in powerpoint. Other times scrolling simply moves the text a little bit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/2020PoliceBrutality/
Solution is in the FAQ: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/faq.html#i-get-errors-about-...
I’ve heard of people spamming readme commits to get their github graph green... I guess if an employer is tricked by something like this they are kinda asking for what they get.
There is a version of fdupes that makes hard links. Maybe it's enough for what you need.
You'd want to compare net capacity as ton miles/gallon. Preferably as cargo rather than gross weight, though I'm using the latter for convenience.

Passenger cars net about 90 or so, for a high-efficiency vehicle, gross vehicular weight, at full capacity.

Assuming 140,000 lb GVWR and 7 mpg, I compute 490 ton-mpg. That's roughly equivalent to numbers given for rail ("move one ton of freight one mile on a gallon of fuel), and is likely high, though 100-250 ton-mpg seems likely.

This is not net cargo efficiency, where that rail number may come from. But gives a sense for numbers.
Alacritty + Starship is heaven

https://starship.rs/
Looks fine for me (Firefox on Linux on a 1440p monitor).