skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Losing customers is not necessarily a bad thing.

Let's say I am having a dinner in a nice quiet restaurant but there is some noisy, aggressive drunk at the table nearby.
I'd be more than happy for the restaurant to lose that customer.
Was it Sprint who ditched 10% of their customers who used to complain the most so they could spend less time arguing with them and provide better service to the rest instead?

Note, this is not to say, that any of these examples applies there but just to illustrate my first sentence.
Did you not see this? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2600286
My point is more that people repeat other people ideas uncritically. Then we have lack of progress.

While I was criticizing you for it, in good faith, I do it myself all the time. It isn't that you should stop repeating other people's ideas, just that you (and I) should be in the habit of wondering "where did that come from? what does it imply that I might not be thinking of? who benefits by the propagation of that idea?" etc

In the case of the leftist dogma, I think there are incorrect assumptions about (1) resentment, (2) cultural diffusion, and (3) fault. Even if you don't share them when you examine it, that argument has a lot of baggage.
What a bunch of children.

It's not cool to antagonize people

It's not cool to DDOS a service.

It's not cool to call someone out in a public forum.

Grow up people.
What truth am I to tell?
Ros from Campaign Monitor here - I've just updated the post based on Matt's contribution above.

It would have been very unwise to recommend that any sender (not just our customers) change how they manage their lists based on an anecdotal report, thus we really did stress that there was no evidence at this stage to back up the claims in the original Lockergnome post.
> bubble up from the Ruby community.

And somehow always involves Zed.
Is GitHub really aiding and abetting this kind of anti-social behaviour/feature? This kind of allegation demands an official response, and soon. Otherwise it's mega bad PR.

More than anything, I'm surprised that you can add a collaborator to a project unilaterally. A way to request an add seems like a natural choice considering you can request pulls.
Device Independence
No. We liked them as people. The cereal story was just evidence of the qualities we sensed when we met them.
Programming Language
Hi. I am a succesful designer and business man without a technical background. I have a consumer website that I am interested in hiring someone to develop for me. I believe the idea is very strong and want to build it " right" once as I think it has a good chance of taking off. What language should I get it programmed in? I am looking for something scaleable that does not have to be rebuilt if we encounter large traffic and will be the right basis in which to approach VC's. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Steve
I'd like this to be true, but I can't help thinking that much of this is just wishful thinking. India has terrible infrastructure, which as far as I can make out is only getting worse. All-pervasive corruption is a big problem as well, as is the fact that _all_ (at least something like 85% or more) politicians are criminals.

The (completely unscientific) impression I get is that things got better between 1995-2005 and are now getting worse. Maybe these expats are just seeing the delta between 199x and 20xx.
It's not just consumer electronics that suffer from integration -- it's pretty much all appliances.

We have a fantastic old (probably 10+ years) clothes washing machine. The lid switch went dead about 2 months ago. We looked at (possible) replacements at a retail store and realized that there was absolutely _no way_ to repair many of the newer models -- a process you can count on given the MTBF of many electronics components. A $10 replacement lid switch from Ebay and a 15-minute solder job and the old machine was back to working beautifully.

It's sad... despite having a professional electronics lab in my home (including hot-air rework, stereo microscope, and a great oscope), I doubt I could repair many (most?) modern electronics failures.
Not sure what type of feature they could add to integrate with instagram. For lack of a better word, they were a parasite on Twitter. Whatever Twitter implements will be better and more seamless than Twitpic.

Same goes for instagram, I think.

I don't think Twitpic will or can foster a community which means they'll always have to leach off someone else's. That's a tough battle to win.
You're missing the point - what if someone created a project called "rawsyntax-is-a-bitch" and continually added you to it?
So basically an Either is for returning a different (ostensibly error) type in a language that normally cares about the declared return type in a method signature?

How would that work for passing the result to another method for analysis? Relax the rules there too? Wouldn't that require doing away with compiler/interpretor type enforcement altogether? (not that I have a problem with that)
Yes, that functionality is at https://github.com/account/repositories . I think the problem here is that there's nothing (?) to prevent the user being re-added. The article does state a github employee showed Zed how to do this - no details though
This is the key to the argument here. It seems Zed said "they won't respond to any complaint" and never filed one before he went to DDOS the account and inadvertently the whole site. Seems like poor form from all sides.
I was referring more to the latent sexual confusion.
Just goes to show you nobody ever gets social features right in the web 2.0 landscape. One of the reasons I've avoided github is because it feels like facebook for code geeks.
I have no idea, but how could this possibly be "SEO gaming?" There aren't even any links. What would they be promoting?
My favourite anti-TOFU (German for Text Oben Fullquote Unten, text above, fullquote below) educational signature is:

Because it sounds backwards.
> Why should I not use the style?
>> Text oben, Fullquote unten.
>>> What is TOFU?

But educational email signatures only go so far. I personally consider the struggle against TOFU lost.
On GitHub's side, it's surprising that they don't offer some sort of 'block/reject' option when somebody gets added as a collaborator.

I'm disappointed in that, but also in all the companies who have employees who think this is acceptably professional behavior.

I'm pretty far from a Zed Shaw fan, but come the fuck on.
I'm surprised by the number of financial services I use that have forced me to use a weak password. It's appalling.
In my oppinion every programming language scales. It is more important which language you catch up fastest.

I would recommend PHP or Python.
PHP is not the nicest language but it will you give you results in very short time.
Python is my personal favorite, it is, in my oppinion, the best programming language for beginners.
A third choice could be Javascript, you need it on the client anywhay, but I am not so sure if it is suited for a beginner to use on the server.
I'll agree with you on the relevance for getting a cheap decent looking web app. I feel that the version control system and text editor recommendations are just begging for flame wars because it's a subjective choice.
Facebook based turing test?
things are still getting better. the presence of bad things doesn't mean you can ignore a huge upswing in living standards all over a country of a billion+ people.
wow, the posts are nothing compared to the comments! and there are thousands of them

I was betting on a fb test account for spam-bots, but I googled she also has a yt account http://www.youtube.com/user/refbatch which is even more creepy than her fb.

first for me it was obvious that's a bot, now I see the very short intervals in the conversation do not make the content impossible to be human generated, still OP's question is valid: what the hell is it???
Yes, something like this is nice. I just wish someone else besides Google did it. Google is way too big. I'd much rather have a majority of the internet comprised of many small companies than several internet giants. It's much healthier..
Has anyone considered the possibility that Zed and this "Nick Martini" person are actually one and the same, and that we are all being trolled by Zed? He's demonstrated in the past that he thrives on attention--more specifically dramatic and controversial attention such as this.

Also, there's always mumbling about immaturity and hipster fanaticism within the "Rubyist" community. But have we seen any example of it outside the titillating tales of Zed Shaw?

What if all of this is just an act?
Besides C2D existing, I have an exceedingly hard time believing that polling accounts for that much bandwidth.
Zedshaw is visible here https://github.com/nickmartini/dongml/contributors Not sure if that is because he pushed commits or because he is added as a contributor.
Develops The Way For Your Business Prosperity
Web Development Company will develop for you an efficient website which will be the way to your business advancement. Moreover the service which it offers is economical and effective too. It is certain to give your business the desired results what you expect.
I'll take the article with a pinch of salt. There's no indication that github did anything actively here. Github's just missing some abuse reporting functionality here.
It's not cool to call someone out, but it's even less cool to have to. What else was he supposed to do? Have a nice reasonable talk with a troll?

Better that he's making people aware rather then continuing a fight that was disrupting a service for others.
> the presence of bad things doesn't mean you can ignore a huge upswing in living standards all over a country of a billion+ people.

You can say that about China, but not about India. Things have not improved much for the average Indian. In fact, in many places it's gotten worse.
oh god, please remake the video with less smiling. exaggerated smiling ALWAYS looks bad in marketing material.
It's because he pushed commits. I have commit access on a private repo on github that I have not pushed commits, and I am not listed on the contributors page.
Thank you for posting this. I had thought that letters were not put behind the paywall.
I suspect 85% of all the worlds politicians are criminals. The sort of people who are willing to do anything to get ahead excel at politics.
You wouldn't be listed on the contributors page, I just verified this. So nobody would see it but you.
The fundamental question is whether enough merchants will accept it in exchange for valuable goods and services that people want. A currency is as valuable as the tangible benefits you can trade it for. It seems unlikely that it will replace the major systems of exchange, nonetheless, I still hold a small amount of my portfolio in bitcoin denominated assets because you never know. Twenty years ago no one could have predicted the impact of the internet on the banking system. Hell, ten years ago most people were still reluctant to use the online banking services offered by their financial institutions. And now we are at a point where a cryptography based ecurrency is the content of this discussion, which seems to be evidence of the validity of the concept. It's just a matter of whether it will catch on.
https://github.com/nickmartini/dongml/commit/b9b8ba94e807fc7...

That isn't very classy, automated or not. It seems more like a pissing match.
It's because commits were pushed with his github-registered email address as the author.
The Man Who Had HIV and Now Does Not
Wow! This is horrifying! It looks like the video from "The Ring"...
3. The idea "it shouldn't matter what language this is written in" sounds good on paper, but it is actually quite flimsy.

Perhaps, but I do think it's commendable that he picks the language he feels he is best with and sticks with it.
It probably was never a top priority feature ... until now.

But they should definitely respond, with an apology, regardless if they all personally hate Zed and would love nothing more than see him get hit by a bus.

Zed throws hissy fits about shit like this, and attracts trolls, because, trolls love public hissy fits. But at the same time Zed writes awesome code and is well known in the open source community.

I am not saying whether we should personally like him or not, but Github getting into a spat with him over this in public can only result in their PR failure.
Shut Down the Business Schools
http://chanarchive.org/4chan/x/11079

"Look at this entry on May 23rd:

Francesca is now a leading figure in the art world and regularly participates in the major biennales by commissioning new works of contemporary art through her foundation called Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary which she founded in 2002 in Vienna Austria.[1] and has built up her own art collection with over four hundred pieces of contemporary video and digital art.[3] The website of the foundation is www.tba21.org. TBA21 has an exhibition space in a historical palace on Himmelpfortgasse 13, in Vienna. It exhibits works from the collection in thematic exhibitions twice a year. The Foundation also organises exhibitions of its collection world wide.

'Video and digital art' That's a bingo! Its an art piece."
The ability to link freely isn't automatic in GPL libraries, it is something that GNU explicitly adds as an exception to the license of GCC; otherwise, GCC is pure GPL [1]. The GNU C library is a related runtime that also explicitly allows linking to proprietary software because it is under the LGPL and not the GPL [2].

What it boils down to is that GPL by itself does not allow reuse without similar disclosures of code, etc. and only a different license (like LGPL) or a documented exception to the license (like in GCC) will change that.

[1] http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/license.html

[2] http://www.gnu.org/s/libc/manual/html_mono/libc.html#Copying
yeah, creepy as hell. if it was a facebook api gaming bot, why on earth they would make a wierd yt account?

unless it's some kind of viral.. a very creepy viral...

oh, and I like the 'spies communicating' theory
Would not stand up well since source code repositories are enjoyed for showing who made commits. Could subpoena Github visit statistics though.
What Channel Is ABC Family On DISH TV?
What channel is ABC Family channel on DISH Network? Channel 180. What is a great night to tune in? Monday night programming is all new, but you can catch quality, family friendly programming anytime. Check DISH TV blog for packages and specials.
<citation needed>

Every presentation I have seen on India cites dramatic improvement from 2000-2010.
Github lost me as a prospective customer (and I currently pay for multi-user accounts at both BeanStalk and Kiln).

They had an unhappy customer, and their staff felt the best way to handle it was to mock the customer publicly. That's juvenile bullshit, no matter what you think of the customer.
The major point is WHY should anyone have to see something they don't want to? And minor point is, seriously, this is like an hour fix if they wanted to.
Can we get some objective data or examples for these claims?
I'm the GitHub employee that fixed the bug. I usually try not to get involved with stuff like this but I feel like I'm in a unique situation to correct the record here.

"They purposefully allow this glaringly obvious mechanism for insulting and annoying their members and are actually involved in the joke."

I've never heard of the joke. I've never heard of anyone at GitHub being involved in one of these jokes.

There has been one case that I'm aware of where someone mass added people to a repository in order to fill up activity feeds. That person was banned. It's an issue we'd like to address more generally.

"Until I broke their server they were all laughing at my 'testing' then they were pissed when they had to fix the bug I found."

I fixed the bug without being aware of any of this. I check our exception monitor every day. It was there. It was obvious. I fixed it.

It was a simple bug triggered by branch names that look like commit SHA1s. Here's the commit:

https://gist.github.com/88bc774d0c97e6c955c0

It affected only branch list pages with branch names matching [0-9a-f]{40}.

"If you don't believe me, look at the HackerNewsTips twitter account, which I know is astroturfed by a github employee."

That is not a GitHub employee. We don't hire anyone that witty as a rule.
Are you sure that's the same person / entity? Grammar / writing style is way different.

Originally I ruled out a single person being behind it just due to the volume / frequency of the FB post. But that refbatch youtube account is hitting 1 video / ten minutes, and that pretty much has to be a real person, so maybe I'm mistaken.
My biggest problem is when politics influences articles about history. Trying to smash all previous ideology into modern factions is insane.
Wow, so much drama.
In theory this is an ideal move for a company like Twitter. They are more and more going the route of Media company.

However what is not cool is the way in which these directions have been taken and the path chosen over the past year or so.

So yes great move for Twitter, the ecosystem and millions of users but somewhere this is getting ugly for companies that were solving this purpose for over 4 years when Twitter did not feel it necessary to do so for "users".
Fixing the motherboard of a desktop PC isn't any easier. Disassembling the laptop is definitely not the hard part.
I googled some quotes from the fb and came across forums where people were linking this yt as her/it's. TBH I didn't make any credibility checks on that.
I always get double freaked out when I see requirements like that, because I assume that the "special characters" restriction is required for some homebrewed crap rot13-style idea they have for obfuscating the passwords instead of hashing them. I literally can't imagine how such a restriction would arise unless they have a bigger problem.
Is Microsoft preparing to cut $100 off Xbox 360-Kinect bundle price?
Interesting. Is there any source for this speculation?
Reminds me of this troll 'Insulting source code': http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=477454
If you're building an app, you should get a VPS rather than shared hosting. Linode is my personal preference.
FYI, in my usage "Ruby hipsters" ⊂ Rubyists
2005 Lotus Elise
2002 BMW M Coupe
1998 BMW M3/4
2002 Subaru WRX
and a minivan.
2.5 of those cars are my wife's.

I spent the weekend working on the Elise, I'm installing a clam hinge kit to make the drivetrain easier to access. http://www.boefabrication.com/Clam.html That's preparation for installing a supercharger. I've never seriously modified a car before, so this is a big learning experience.

Also shopping for a newer daily use car to replace the Subaru and M3. Looking at the BMW 1 Series M Coupe, a Mini Cooper, the Fiat 500 Abarth (not yet available), and the only rumored Honda CR-Z Type R (barely a rumor).
She is a paranoid schizophrenic

http://chanarchive.org/content/1_b/331156470/1306721998799.p...
The comments that "Karin" is leaving on her own status updates strike me (caveat: I am not a mental health professional, though my parents both are!) as fairly classic paranoid (like, actually diagnosably paranoid) talk. Delusions of persecution via secret networks operating within complicated bureaucracies, interspersed with violent imagery, is pretty much what paranoids spend their time thinking about. 500 years ago they probably would have given you an elaborate description about all the different kinds of demons in hell; now it's all about the CIA and the Bilderberg Group or (in this case) international academia.

Anyway, long story short, my guess is that this isn't spam/CEO gaming at all, but a mentally ill human being. I'm frankly surprised there aren't a lot more Facebook/Twitter accounts like this.
That's outdated advice, unfortunately. You can't do this with most hard drives anymore. To use one of my most-loathed manufacturers as an example (and the worst offender when it comes to hard drive recoveries), Western Digital stores head calibration data in two places: in the system area on the platters, and in an eprom on the circuit board. Both sets of data are matched at the factory and have to stay matched.

You can replace the circuit board on a WD drive with a match from the exact same model, from the same factory, manufactured the same day (guessing by the serial number anyway), and the drive will still fail to give you your data back.

When the system area becomes unreadable or doesn't match the contents of the eprom on the controller board, WD drives will show up in BIOS with a generic model name and no other information about the drive. There's no easy way to coax them into cooperating.

If you're lucky, you have one of the WD models with an accessible eprom on the controller board, and you might be able to either desolder and swap it with the replacement board, or, if you have the appropriate equipment, use a special clothespin-like tool to latch on to the chip's pins, read its data out, and write that to the donor board. If you're unlucky, the eprom is integrated into another chip, and nothing short of some pretty expensive equipment will be able to handle it.

However, at this point, almost everyone that doesn't work at a professional data recovery lab is waaaay over their heads, and only making the recovery job harder (or impossible) for the lab.

Additionally, a lot of WD drives now have the head stack spindle mounted by a screw to the top cover; once you pull the top cover, you've lost the head calibration for the drive. Getting any data off the platters at all at that point requires a moderately expensive homebrew tool with several calipers that screws into the head stack spindle; you manually adjust calibration until data starts coming in reliably.

We no longer do physical data recoveries in our shop; about the end of last year these piece-of-crap drives started coming in, and none of the old tricks worked on them. We looked into the equipment (and subsequent training) required to do these sorts of recoveries, with an eye towards providing very-low-cost recoveries (since we have plenty of other revenue streams), and we simply can't afford the initial $15,000 outlay for it.

We've made it our mission this year to get effective data backups working for every single one of our clients.

TL;DR: swapping controller boards and other tricks no longer work. You really really really need to have backups.
Someone I am speaking with is telling me he would program in Microsoft. Any thought about that Vs. Php?
Your paranoia is more generous than mine. Such restrictions always make me assume that they don't know how to properly sanitize data for their database, so they just disallow such characters rather than learn how.
Perhaps a new entity is needed? Think of a zipcar like service which is accountable for the vehicle. Large enough to absorb the occasional accident, and pressure automakers for safety/efficiency improvements.
Hashbangs
I don't want an apology, I want them to add a feature that prevents people from abusing others. If throwing a "hissy fit" gets it done then rock on. If not then I'll go somewhere else.

That's what's great about a meritocracy in a free market.
I wonder what the discrepancy is between the two averages. Whether it be a few gigs, or just a couple hundred megs.
Zed really has a victim complex. As Ryan validated above, I can guarantee you anyone who has any authority at all at github did not encourage or sanction this behavior. It may not have been high on the fix queue, but thats because they expected people to be rational, and they can just manually ban the people who abuse the system.

Zed.. seriously... the world is not out to get you. We love your code and your contributions. Don't let a few losers get you down.