skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's more intricate? Perhaps Lord of the Rings?

This narrative spans 50+ years of writing across many (hundreds of?) titles. It combines comic books, regular books, TV and movies.
The OP states that they do not care about the particular VCS, just that there is a public repo. Someone else responds that there is a private repo (without specifying a particular VCS). The crux of the matter here is public vs private and lump-sum version level changes vs something more granular.
That's not how divide and conquer works. Divide and conquer works by turning two groups against one another and not joining the fight. Instead, you wait for them do the most resource intensive damage first, then swoop in and conquer both once they've made each other sufficiently weak.
The first poster in that thread was just asking for trouble, bringing that know-it-all attitude.
I'm seeing a lot of misinformation in the thread about what public source control entails. Scary!
It is pretty off-putting to me that such a critical piece of infrastructure isn't developed completely in the open, especially with such a large amount of security code. Companies get criticized all the time for this style of open source development.
How are you going to cause arbitrary interrupts from the shell?
FYI, the 'xfinitywifi' hotspots you've seen over the past couple years are this same thing deployed via Comcast Business customers' modems.
Actually Haskell does have some dependently typed features (and is being extended constantly). The reason it isn't used in that particular package is a mystery, except that a lot of these things are very new and Haskell is an evoloving ecosystem. That particular package simply may not have a release that uses all the latest GHC features.

Repa for instance does provide type errors based on dimensionality of matrices. This is a package on Hackage.

See http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Numeric_Haskell:_A_Repa_T...
I've used iodine dns tunneling when travelling, it's slooooooow, like 28.8 dial up slow.
Wietse uses source control. He just doesn't open it up to the hoi polloi.

In the era before social coding (when postfix originated), this wasn't uncommon for open source projects. qmail and sendmail didn't have public VCS either.

Not everything has to be like everything else. Wietse is a dedicated, responsive, talented steward of his project. We don't need to see his WIP commits, and he might not have the inclination to accept patches from unvetted strangers.

I'm ok with letting him run it the way he thinks works best.
> So, now I'm a "kid" (with the obvious insinuation that I'm dumb and inexperienced) if I think maybe perhaps version control is a good idea

You're misreading the thread. The specific comment was:

> kids these days see every software development/maintenance task as something that must get crushed under a git-shaped sledgehammer regardless of whether that's the reasonable or sensible thing to do.

which is seems more like a knock against git and possibly the culture around sites like github, than against version control per se. One person in the thread does say that the author uses VCS, but doesn't make it public.

The contributors to the project seem happy with the current setup and workflow, and frankly the guy who was looking for a public repository was kind of a dick about it.
Understanding your own human nature does not give you power over it.
> It is wrong, though.

As an Eastern European, I think he got it right. From my own experience, there's a huge difference in trustworthiness between the Western and other countries/regions.

I have tons of stories to support this, but here's just one: in supermarkets in my own country, you're not allowed to walk in with a backpack (you have to seal it outside or leave it in a locker); I've never had to do that in the US.
I set mine own up on a private server and I've gotten up to 120kB/s. It's usually fast enough to browse HN comfortably.
Well, except that git was created for Linux by its creator, Torvalds. It still was the author's (Torvalds) decision to use a VCS.
But no need to fall into the troll. The author of the original thread is obviously clueless.

edit: fixed 2 pretty big typos.
Is using Subversion really so bad?

Until pretty recently tools like git, hg, bzr didn't exist. Now one of those is looking abandoned in its own right.

Switching repos and tools isn't trivial, and really if the tool is free software and works across common OSs, I really don't see the problem. DVCS doesn't have to work for everyone.
sheer disdain displayed for good-but-differing practices is depressing.

Funny you should criticize the postfix community for this. Did you see what they are responding to?

Source control (SCM/VCS) is a MUST have. It's unbelievable that people just work with tarballs without proper source control. It doesn't matter which you use, but it must be available. Sending patches over email is what people did last century...

I think the "kids these days" comment was in reference to someone waltzing in, contributing nothing, and demanding everything immediately be done their way.
I've been a mathematician programming in a variety of languages over the last 20 years, and I can say that if it "doesn't really have any great numerical or scientific tooling" then I won't even give it thought number one for doing computations.
It's articles like this (and videos by Mr. Degrasse Tyson) that make me wish I majored in Physics.
No, using subversion isn't that bad. It's the rest of ImageMagick's workflow that was bad. SVN was just the cherry on top.
What would be the grounds for a class action suit? In all the examples you give, they sell you a good that meets the advertised specs. If someone is advertising generic blank DVDs, for instance, and they happen to sell you TDK media one day, I don't see how you can make a legal case that this binds them to only selling you TDK media. If you want TDK media, you should be buying from someone who advertises TDK media.
After lurking on the discussions@password-hashing.net, the Password Hashing Competition's mailing list the last several months, I can say I am initially skeptical of this.

One of the primary concerns for PHC was making an algorithm which is hard to speed up on custom hardware. Bill Cox, Solar Designer, et al. went at this very hard, and I think their approach will turn out to be favored.

I'm a little bit concerned that if the algorithm is now flexible enough, to not be implemented efficiently in a more generalized circuit, then is it flexible enough to behave possibly erratically?

But I'm not even sure if this GSHA type algorithm really would be all that difficult to implement in an ASIC.

Of course, the great thing is that an algorithm promising such benefits is in high demand, Proof-of-Work algorithms, and so anything which shows merit will probably be explored and tested.
> All cultures prior to the invention of the modern state. Basically all current "native" cultures, including but in no sense limited to: the Bemba, the Nuer, the Iroquois, Polynesians, Melanesians, etc. etc. etc. Almost all day to day interactions (familial, friendly, etc.).

Do those scale to populations of millions?
I think your criticism of svn is off the mark. But I agree that the work flow that you listed there is terrible.
Brighthouse has been quietly doing something similar throughout central Florida (at least) for a year or so. I only saw it at businesses and in the cases I saw there were two separate modems.

My guess is that there's no way this doesn't degrade the customers' connection.
> and he might not have the inclination to accept patches from unvetted strangers.

I keep seeing this implication, but it simply doesn't follow at all. Nobody said anything about letting everyone commit changes in a free-for-all.
TLDR: Stream-oriented, resource-conscious, lossless compression algorithm to replace gzip/deflate, with a compression ratio comparable to the best currently available general-purpose compression methods and which decompresses much faster than current LZMA implementations.
I'm a fan of MA, but I think people equate him with sainthood. He's not a saint. He's a pioneer that pushed the internet forward, made some mistakes, and now has some wisdom (and money) to dispense. I give his writing some credence, but nobody is perfect. I like that he has made post-browser mistakes. That gives credibility to his writing.
Since many people reading this aren't familiar with the NYC public school system, I think it is important to emphasize NYC has many, many, opportunities for students to get specialized education at the high school level that is not dependent on standardized tests. When i was in High School there was The Urban Academy, the School for the Arts, City as School, and many high schools had "magnet" programs that students could apply to and if accepted, they would attend a school that was "better" than their local (zoned) school on a academic track with a particular emphasis (journalism, science, etc.) This system was byzantine, and made going to high school much like applying to college, but there was no lack of options. Since that time many more alternatives have been introduced, not only charter schools but many other schools based on particular theories and approaches to education. The only schools predicated on a single standardized test are the ones referenced in the article, and i think it is great there are schools with objective criteria for admission.

I attended Stuyvesant in the 90s, and the student body wasn't very diverse. However, changing from a single objective test to an array of subjective criteria does nothing to alleviate the root problem, that some kids are getting better primary education than others. All such an initiative can do is weaken those schools and make them more like every other school in the city.
> Knowing what not to put in is sometimes the best way to keep good code.

What does that have to do with exposing a read only versioned history? Nobody is asking him to give the whole world commit privileges.
One correction to the article - The Comcast program is not "Opt-In" as the article notes, but an "Opt-Out" program.
I read somewhere that postfix is used by around 30% of the internets to send mail. That's really concerning because we have no history for the code, just a code drop. Given the amount of criticism for projects like android (which does have a public git repo but is also a code drop), I posted this here as I was wondering what people thought of such projects.

These days I think of free software to have a public version control as a given. So coming across this was a shocker for me. I think Wietse is free to do whatever he wants but it's just sad that we have to depend on this software so much :(
Say "Torvald" one more time.
Which is one of the reasons why http://www.graphicsmagick.org was started. You should check it out if you haven't already. Almost identical commands, much healthier dev environment.
If they don't want contributors then why take patches via email? (Unless that bit wasn't actually true)
I confess that I also do not understand the code in the article. (But I am still only a student of Haskell.) I can only guess, based on my own work with this idea of Cells-type programming, that the author means the following:

Suppose you have three data nodes, or cells: A, B, C, and D. A holds the value 5, B holds 3, C is defined as A+B, and D is defined as B*C. In a spreadsheet, changing cell A will automatically update C, because C directly depends on A. It will also update D because it transitively depends on B through C, and C has changed. This library (and the Clojure one I mentioned in my other post) lets you define data structures which behave the same way.

In a pure environment, you can emulate this using only functions. In a non-pure environment, automatically updating values can be quite nice. You use this to implicitly trigger linked behaviors. In a UI, this could mean changing the state of several elements in response to some input without having to explicitly say updateElementA(), updateElementB(), and so on.
Contribution is not a prerequisite for criticism. Deserved criticism, in this case.
> After reviewing the trends, Smil introduces a surprising and counterintuitive idea he calls relative dematerialization. As innovation lets us make a given product more efficiently, with fewer materials or energy, prices go down and consumption goes up.

Looks like Gates isn't very familiar with the ideas of Buckminster Fuller then. Bucky identified ephemeralization as a key technological trend over 70 years ago. [1]

[1] R. Buckminster Fuller, Nine Chains to the Moon, Anchor Books [1938] 1971 pp. 252–59.
> For example, how many of us simply memorized stacks of words to achieve higher scores on the SAT -- did that kind of memorization somehow quickly make us more 'prepared' for college? Of course not, it was just a way to game the metric.

Personally, I studied vocabulary extensively for the SAT and GRE, and retained the majority of it; that preparation made a major difference in my baseline everyday vocabulary. Not all test preparation needs to go to waste immediately after the test.
True, but the studies offer statistical numbers to solidify what would otherwise be generalizations. Science!
It's not like the postfix code is hidden, or even difficult to find. Nothing is being done in secret here.

If you want to work on a new feature that'll take a long time and require several people, grab the code, stick it in git, and work on it with your team. Once the work is done, send a patch to the postfix maintainer, and he'll merge it if it's worthwhile.

Linus created git because the above workflow was killing him trying to handle the patches for the Linux kernel. He was doing it almost exactly as described above for a long time. I suspect postfix sees a far lower volume, and the above workflow probably works just fine.
> If a hunter goes out, learns out how to kill an animal, and then teaches everyone else in the tribe how to do the same, he is shooting himself in the foot because he is no longer useful. The tribe can get their own food and his specialization is no longer special. So he dies off. Unless, he's ready to retire the hunting business and/or holds the monopoly for creating the weapons.

This ignores competitive and first-mover advantages. Maybe he's the best hunter (because of experience or talent), or maybe no one else wants or is able to be a hunter (especially if it's dangerous or physically-demanding).

Essentially, you're arguing that the sole hunter should keep a strong grip on the hunting monopoly by keeping everyone ignorant. In practice, this never works out well.
You still can audit the code for security purposes pretty easily using the tarballs if you were so inclined. While granular commits (of the sort you see with public repos) are useful, they are by no means necessary for this sort of thing.
Buy yourself an Oculus rift and try this, trust me you will not be disappointed http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUD95E3G2wc
Broccoli: First Beta Release
People can run their own projects how they want. But this is not just a question of preference -- an open source project developed this way is strictly less useful than one that exposes its true fine-grained history.

They quite literally throw away (or keep locked up, which is the same for us non-insiders) information that is relevant to understanding and debugging the project.

The only reason for that is misplaced vanity.

Note that nobody is asking to see your code before you're ready. You still get to choose when to push that fancy new release to the public repository. And nobody is asking you for write access.
It's one thing to do things you don't want to do because they're necessary, because they help people, or because it brings in money.

It's quite another to do things you don't want to which are completely useless but which tick some good boxes on some application form.

I see this sort of argument regarding schools put forward all the time. "The real world is full of busywork and arbitrary rules and you need to learn how to deal with it." It drives me batty, because it really is not true.
VCS is being used, so the criticism is unfounded:

"i would suggest that you ask questions first or be quiet
the postfix author is using a VCS but he do not need
to provide access to you or me "

Anyone can criticise anything for any reason.

Criticism is so easy to generate that it is worth absolutely nothing.

The process they use works for them.

I guarantee that I could come into your place of work and criticise pretty much everything you do, pointing out that there is a better way of doing it (because there will be, from some angle).

This is not useful, and whether or not I am correct on any specific point it is unlikely to be well received.
"In general, a character can be represented in 1 byte or 2 bytes. Let's say 1-byte character is ANSI character - all English characters are represented through this encoding. And let's say a 2-byte character is Unicode, which can represent ALL languages in the world."

No. A character can be three or four bytes. I think he meant ASCII, not ANSI. And no, two byte characters are not "Unicode". I feel like this article might do a disservice to folks who aren't totally clear about Unicode before theyread it. I would strongly recommend reading Joel Spolsky's "The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)" and being totally clear on that before trying to read this.
Funny that gatesnotes.com is using Apple's 'Share' icon and not the Windows version…
Thanks! Started looking for information on this earlier this weekend :)
Well, I imagine she's actually making money with her original content - and then they're saying she can't, because it happens to refer to their "unique braand".
Funny title, I created an award-winning photo of a concrete pillar saying 'hug me' a good 6-7 years ago. Here's the image! http://imgur.com/4VJwXRg
True. I should have written "might not have the inclination to invite unvetted strangers into the development process".

Having a relatively high bar for participation (email Wietse, courteously, and suggest some useful modifications, and offer to work on them) seems like a completely valid filter process to me.

It takes a special kind of personality to be the public facing patch czar of a hugely popular open source project that runs everywhere with elevated privileges and firewall rules set to allow direct connections from anywhere.

Perhaps Wietse has decided that's not the life he wants to live.
I'm pretty sure Time Warner has been doing this in NY for some time now
The Criminalization Of Employment Law
Since Wietse is wary of accepting patches from other people, publishing even a read-only version control repository does absolutely nothing for him. Instead it would only be a burden, not only because he might have to change his workflow, but also because it would invite patches from people who only know how to use version control and can't make it over the barrier of using tar, diff, and patch.
It's not pedantic or petulant. The infographic is misleading, though not dramatically so.

It looks suspicious to compare the US until the year 2000 and China only starting in 2011. There's a gap of a decade. If you assume that US use is likely increasing (a decent assumption), then the statistic could be misleading.

It turns out that the US has used about a gigaton in just the last decade. That's a bit more than twice as fast as its average during the 20th century.

During the past 3 years, China used cement about 29 times faster than the US. If you aren't careful, you might think the infographic suggests that number is 48x.

http://www.statista.com/statistics/273367/consumption-of-cem...

China has a lot of people and a lot of catching up to do. Even the misleading number isn't that surprising to me. It turns out concrete lasts a while, and US usage has been spread over a century. In the long run, the integral matters more than today's derivative.
Hands-on way to learn Android App Development
>The US economy became the world's largest one some time in the 1920's,

Also two world wars which left most of Europe in shambles.
And yes, I am aware that Japan was in China at the time.
"open source" definitely refers to libre usage terms:

http://opensource.org/docs/definition.php

The "source" for a bitmap image (PNG/BMP etc) can be a vector image (SVG, PostScript etc) or maybe a multi-layer bitmap image (Gimp, Photoshop etc). The "source" in "open source" refers to that the files that were transformed into the files in question are available under a libre license, not what kind of file format or language they are represented in.
The c and c++ apis seem to make things worse. The right solution for charset conversion seems to be iconv.
We have not, so far. It's a bit difficult to package up as it mostly consists of a bunch of (potentially environment dependent) shell scripts with a transformation program. Shouldn't be too hard to replicate, as the total LOC is pretty low.

Do you have a specific use for it? If so, let me know about it, as I might be able to try lobbying for packaging and releasing the code or work something out.
There is an existing, available source of read only versioned history, available online for anyone to see:

ftp://ftp.porcupine.org/mirrors/postfix-release/index.html

It's tarballs for each release, with associated patches for each release. That's a pretty complete read only versioned history.

Why does it have to be a VCS?
Ask HN: How do I protect myself when providing freemium SaaS product?
I've been developing a service that applies version control ideas to a fairly conservative field and would appreciate tips on ensuring I protect myself, legally, from possible issues that may be created when I open it to the public.

As a Canadian university student who's been on HN for awhile, I have a vague idea of what I should do- terms and conditions, separation of financials, and copyright notices- but have no comprehensive, or coherent, solution regarding how to avoid legal trouble which is expensive, time consuming, and generally unpleasant.

Thanks for any tips or guides you may have.
Again, none of that is precluded by a read-only public VCS. The process of discussing changes and patches on the mailing list can still be identical if that's what they like.

People seem to be equating "expose some VCS" with "run a github-style repo where anybody can stick pull requests into your queue". The two are not the same.

It is entirely reasonable to ask an open source project to stop hiding useful information that they already have and could share at zero cost.
Thanks very much for your question. I didn't realize what a horrible job of writing I did until I read your response!!
Keep in mid the story is a bit more complicated than than - Linus/Linux was using Bitkeeper, until their free license to all kernel devs and interested parties went away - _then_ Linus wrote git.

The need/usefulness of version control was orthogonal to (and preceded) the decision to write his own (d)vcs.

(Edit: misrememebred the actual vcs, originally posted Mercurial instead od Bitkeeper - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitKeeper#History )
There's plenty of history:

ftp://ftp.reverse.net/pub/postfix/official/

Additionally, the history is mirrored on all the continents except Australia, http://www.postfix.org/download.html

Sure, there's no commit history for every change, but there's release notes for every version. What is the use case for knowing what intermediate things may have been available to some small group prior to release?
Someone did a github mirror: https://github.com/vdukhovni/postfix

Their worklflow seems to be:

* Make a change
* Write the meaning of the change in the HISTORY file
* Release a tarball of the source with the change

Here is the HISTORY file: https://github.com/vdukhovni/postfix/blob/master/postfix/HIS...
Because that history is way too coarse to answer the kind of questions that a VCS can answer.

And because they already have a VCS, and are just stubbornly unwilling to share all that useful information with the wider community.
Pied piper.