skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A part of the problem is that GitHub makes it difficult to find forks. If a project is not being maintained in the original repository, and somebody else is maintaining it, it should be made easier to discover those other forks.

Right now, when you click the "forks" link in Github it shows a pretty graph of commits across branches and repositories, which although useful in some cases, is very hard to navigate and doesn't help discover active forks.

Moreover, for the maintainer of the alternative fork, it would be nice to be able to clone the pull-requests too from the main repo. They will be able to merge any new PRs into their own fork quickly and also to automatically inform the PR's watchers.
FYI

Spain has the second biggest high speed train network of the world, with over 3.000 km (many more kilometers being built), just after China.

This 2014, 28M people will have traveled by train, compared to 31.2M in USA in 2012. The goal is to reach 56M in a few years. After many years where the prices were expensive, we have started to liberalize it and prices have go down. Now it's reasonable cheap. You can buy one-way tickets for 30€ for a 1h30 route (like 4h by car). Madrid-Barcelona is one of the most demanding routes and flights can't compete with the high speed train. In just a few years, people have moved from using flights to most of them using the train. It's way way more comfortable.

Of course, the key question is geography. Trains works best for a distance less than 1.000km. In Spain that's the distance from east to west or south to north. In USA there are some areas that make a lot of sense like Boston-NY-Philly-Washington; and California.
Did Paypal just remove the issue reporting page or is the link in the article just wrong? https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/security/report-problem
> Ok, so if the mailing list is dead and your pull requests aren't the only ones being ignored, why not just fork the project and 'own the process' yourself?

That's not necessarily straightforward even for experienced OSS contributors, but in the given context (newbies who have been encouraged to get into OSS by contributing a patch), it's really a non-starter.
On the lack of cultural estrangement in SF
I don't find the opening post to be rude. Jake Lodwick simply states that he's wasted a lot of time tracking down a known limitation that should have been listed in the docs, and that he feels Labnik could try a bit harder to avoid wasting other people's time. Probably Jake was frustrated there. It's not something I'd consider worth posting, but he was hardly abusive.

Then, Labnik's post is pointlessly emotional and irrelevant, making a big deal out of a simple complaint. I feel like working with people like him would be more likely to make me burn out on open source. The author is acting dramatic and overreacting to a relatively mild comment.
I'm a TN-1 visa holder and you've got some misinformation in your post. Nothing major but some of the details can be important when talking about working in another country. First you're correct that computer programmer is not on the list of approved occupations. However, both systems analyst and software engineer are listed. Most people view software engineer and programmer as being the same but you have to make sure you use the correct terms.

The length of the visa is up to three years. It also can't go past when your passport expires and may be shorter depending on your job offer. It can be renewed many times (I think up to twenty years but could be wrong).

Application and renewal is normally pretty easy. If you're doing a border crossing it takes a little time and a $50 fee. If you're doing it through the mail it takes about 2 months and a larger fee (several hundred dollars).
We're talking about what Western governments are doing today

What do you mean, "We"? The submitted article purported to be about a worldwide phenomenon, and on a worldwide basis, what the Western countries and their democratically elected governments are doing for Internet freedom looks quite good. On a worldwide basis, regarding Internet freedom, the performance of China, North Korea, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, and a lot of other countries and their governments is much worse than that of the Western countries, and yet some participants here who enjoy Western freedom are trying to shut down the broader discussion here by pointing only to the wrongs of Western governments. We know a lot more about what the Western governments are doing than we do about what the other governments are doing precisely because we live in an environment of much more free press in the West than elsewhere. This bias in availability of information shouldn't bias all of our discussions of worldwide issues on Hacker News. (Disclosure: I speak and read languages other than English and have lived in a non-Western, non-English-speaking country before, so I don't have a narrow national perspective on this issue, but rather attempt to have a worldwide perspective on it.)
West Trying to Get Putin Assassinated
What if the out.Write (which is presumably in "some code") has already set err? Then we lose _that_ error, if out.Close returns error.

I think this is tricky in any language.
We should not have to presume. Since Github is soliciting contributions to linguist [0], they've created an obligation to engage with outside contributors and explain their decisions. When the author wrote his blog post, there were over a hundred PRs and apparently no acknowledgement of many of them from Github. In his "How to destroy your community" talk [1], Josh Gruber refers to silence as "the most effective community destroyer of them all".

I'm not actually trying to call out Github, by the way. It's great that they've written up guidelines for contributing [0], and a glance at the PRs shows much more engagement now.

[0] https://github.com/github/linguist/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING....
[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/370157/
No, it's entitlement to think that your time is so much more valuable than other people's. So much so, that you think it's acceptable to waste their time and effort because you're too lazy to add 1 line of text to a README.
I started out thinking this was a little tedious and even came up with a little library [1] to use the panic-recover style handling within a package [2].

However, after a few months of writing code using that model, I find that I don't really like it and prefer the if err != nil model much more.

While this can appear to be a little tedious, I've found it extremely useful once I started checking code coverage in my tests. It makes it very clear which exceptional cases you aren't testing. This in turn makes it obvious how well tested the code is. I know from looking at my code coverage what kind
failures I'm handling properly and which ones I'm delegating to the caller. This allows for better documentation where API users know what failure modes to expect.

[1] https://godoc.org/github.com/surullabs/fault
[2] https://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#recover
I shouldn't waste my time making a PR if someone is going to ignore it. Really, there should also be a way of someone marking a project as "needing a maintainer" so that someone that is very interested in a project succeeding can take it over and its work can continue (including the previously unmerged PRs).
HD Birds Wallpapers for Desktop and Mobiles
Sure. You could. But there's a big step between it being possible, and being (what the author implies) a moral obligation. In fact, there's probably a big step between it being possible and it being worth it.

If Uber actually got big enough that it became one of the only transportation options, then they might have some kind of moral obligation to setup a phone tree to help people who don't have any other options. But I don't think they're anywhere close to that.
This article shows that mothers consider their firstborn children to do better in school - nothing less, nothing more. The fact that 90% of kids were rated above average says a lot about the validity of the conclusions.
The Personal Growth Check List
Pander to those in charge at Product Hunt (http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/2ea4ji/how_long_is...), then spam people on Twitter asking them to upvote your submission (https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=product%20hunt%20upv...)

I am not being facetious. That is how you get featured on PH and I'm not happy about it.
A plausible explanation I haven't seen suggested in this article is: lack of surprise.

This is slightly different than the divided-attention and lazy-parent theories.

There is evidence we learn more when we get answers wrong, not right. It's reasonable to assume then the more children you have the more right answers you eventually have as parent. And the same goes for a first child. You are both surprised when something goes wrong and you both learn from it.

The problem is, the parent doesn't necessarily need to be learning more as they have more children, so they take the shortcut of not letting younger children get answers wrong. They don't let them get surprised. Parents don't give younger children as many chances to screw up.
The top operating speed of the TGV is in the neighborhood of 230MPH, isn't it?

If you can cost-effectively deploy rail that averages 300MPH, rail becomes more attractive. But the average speed of the Shanghai Maglev is 155MPH. It's nothing close to 300MPH.

It is extraordinarily unlikely that any train using current technology is going to average 200MPH between Chicago and Houston. Even with TGV-comparable trains, the trip from Chicago to Houston will take 8+ (heh) hours --- and that presumes an expenditure of public resources unparalleled in the last 50 years... all to get to a place where it would still be still be irrational not to take one of the many tens of airliner trips between those two cities every day.
Exactly that, "his own people" including himself, which is arguably more brave than calling more powerful artillery fire on your own position. See PhasmaFelis comment in this subthread; this is the true last resort after final protective fire.
I agree. The author has released something into the world in the hopes that it will further progress for someone else or themselves. That's awesome. And the OSS community on GitHub has some great tools to fork the project if the author disengages.

But I do think that those tools aren't obvious or are outside the confidence level of many new contributors, and can be a real detriment to convincing developers that open source is worth their time.

It would be great to point less-experienced developers to a list of open source projects that are very responsive and supportive in their pull request management for their first contibutions. Does a list like that exist?
http://bsd.slashdot.org/story/14/08/06/1731218/facebook-seek...
Since 4.4 Android uses the Enforced Mode of SELinux, which should limit some privileges. Can the root user still have access to the passwords in this situation?
Fresher to Expert: A beginner's guide to software skill development
so, why is it trending if it is so old news?
As somebody who maintains a decent amount of Rust libraries, I do try to keep on top of my PRs, but sometimes Github's notification system makes it easy to forget that some PRs have been sitting around for a long time. For example if you click on a notification in your inbox, it automatically gets marked as read - you can't keep it around as a reminder.

What would be really nice is if you could have some sort of dashboard to let you know the status of your outstanding issues and PRs on all of your repositories - how long they have been open for, whether they are stale or not... etc. It's just too hard to go through each repo individually to check on its health.
I know they're technically different; what I wanted to point out is that it's not such a far-fetched idea.
FB makes some tools that make me happy.
Huh? Of course it doesn't: neither Texas nor California have routes that would be economical for an Acela-like service. LA-SD is a single point-to-point route; neither LA nor SD connect economically with any other California city.

I also don't understand your "peak versus average" speed thing. You're comparing apples-oranges, not me: I'm comparing peak-to-peak. Normal Amtrak trains also don't average 75MPH!
I wouldn't waste time with donations.

With ads you would be targeting about $150/mo or $5/cpm with US visitors, maybe 25-50% of that internationally. So, you could try to sell something on the site, and if you don't make that much - go for the ads.

I would do adsense and not waste time with the other ad networks unless you had time to try different ones out and find one that yields better than that..
Which would remove the most obvious place to look for commits for this new fork, or for this patch that you were just about to write.
Obviously I have some coding skills but I see myself as a non-technical one. I said "I could do it myself in a day" meaning, the work he has done was so easy that even I could do it in some days. I've developed the MVP of our webapp but my coding skills are not so advanced to make it better. So I decided to hire someone who is better than me.

Yes I know, it's better to code it yourself but we have now paying clients and it must be ready as soon as possible. With my own skills and learning curve it will take too much time.
no comments, yet trending. its a complex subject, i was hoping for some HN commenters to shed some light
FWIW - the guy in question (Lake Jodwick) did apologize for his behavior:

https://twitter.com/jakelodwick/status/533777782484897792
If you use try-with-resources in Java 7, you don't need to write any exception handling.

The function would be '... throws IOException'. That seems to satisfy the "think of disk/network failure as a very common case" design goal with minimal boilerplate. That brings up a separate discussion on checked vs unchecked exceptions, but I guess we can save that one for comparisons against a language with unchecked exceptions!
if one HAD to choose a non-erlang stack (for whatever reason), what would you choose ?

Go, Nodejs or Java - I'm mainly concerned about clustering, because I think that is what gave the Whatsapp devs their ability to scale(without having to do too much re-engineering).

Or can the clustering be moved to something like the queuing layer ?
So? Median CEO pay in 2000-2011 was over $2m/year. That's excluding another $6m in stock and stock options. If that equity is locked up such that they get 1/30th every year for 30 years, they still won't be eating cat food.

I'll note that the companies of the post-war economic boom (1946-1980) did well enough even though median CEO compensation (cash, stock, and options) was around $1m annually in real terms. So it's reasonable to think that we'll still be able to attract decent talent for the merely 2x that CEOs are getting in cash. The long-term stock would be an incentive for long-term behavior.
The Bottom of the Org Chart
> Very intelligent, otherwise rational people believe in false propositions that make them feel happy, relieved or secure all the time.

Exactly. I too have found that many people like to have their "ears tickled". It feels like people don't want to put up with sound reason and instead believe in doctrines and beliefs that suit their own personal tastes.

>An afterlife doesn't need to be proven false. There just has to be some evidence,

Very true, many belief systems over the millenia have taught an afterlife scenario (commonly following a 'Good Afterlife' vs. 'Bad Afterlife' theme). This comes from many belief systems carrying the notion of a "part" of the human that carries on immortally beyond the physical body (believed to be an immortal soul by Christian groups -- interestingly, the bible carries no support of this notion).

Even people who believe in this immortality notion cannot provide evidence of it's existence, yet work on the assumption that it can't be proven false. (Although, depending on your authoritative scriptures, it sometimes can be.)

A political Jewish group in the days of Jesus were known for strongly believing in the Torah, but not in this immortality notion [0].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadducees#General

>You're made of meat, death is final, there is no do-over.

I agree. Humans cannot stop death on their own, if they were to ever have a hope of overcoming death it would have to be via some external force that was vastly more powerful and smarter than they. Many ancient belief systems attribute this power to either a God, multiple gods working in unison, or to 'The Universe' (as in: that is simply the ways thing are).

In summation, it's NOT okay to say: GOD EXISTS! or GOD DOES NOT EXIST! or whatever oversimplified nonsense you can angrily yell in under 5 seconds and proceed to use as the foundation of the ideals for your entire life.

A truly rational person understands this.
Good examples for open source contribution management
Because of the bad examples of handling of contributions to open source projects lately on HN[1][2] I show you a positive example I experienced the past eleven days[3] which motivates me to go on with contributing:

"I like the direction of this PR [...]"

"These changes are a nice improvement. [...]"

"r+, thanks!"

"That's an interesting question."

Big thanks jdm and the servo project for being so responsive to issues and PRs. I guess using the same communication and code sharing mechanisms (wiki, open bug tracker, pull requests and code review) for internal work AND for external contributions eases the observation and integration of contributions.

[1] How to discourage open source contributions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8712349

[2] The reason people burn out on open source
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8712035

[3] https://github.com/servo/servo
This is a big security problem with iframes. I have hoped for years that developers of the major browsers should understand this and automatically change the adress bar to the iframes url when the iframe is having focus. Problem solved!
Hey, I'd rather spend the time I spend in airports and airplanes in the Acela. I'll probably never fly between two Acela-connected cities. I have a strong preference for trains.

That doesn't mean a massive investment in rail is a good plan for the US, or, for that matter, that Brookings is right that we're in the middle of a rail renaissance.
There is some previous discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2129726 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2571936
I've been programming without if statements. It feels a lot better using pattern matching instead of if statements.
I was rather disappointed this wasn't a port of TodoMVC to Emacs.

Any particular reason this is front-page news? I'm not currently an Emacs user, but I've been considering it. Maybe I'm missing something notable buried in this list.
I think multi-core mcu's have interrupt independence per core.
I didn't misunderstand. I think the confusion may stem from the question of whom the taxation is bad for - the maintainer or the contributors.

I don't believe prospective co-committers should ever be taxed for their contributions. If their contributions aren't helpful/don't live up to their standards, you can reject the request with a polite explanation.

Open-source project maintainers should understand that by posting their code on GitHub, they're inviting contributions -- that's why GitHub is called "social coding." Its purpose is to make code better through a marketplace of contributions. If you put your code there, you voluntarily accept the burden of dealing with PRs. If that's the tax people are concerned with, there's an easy way to escape it: don't use GitHub, or disable the "issues" feature in the repository. I'm not sure if you can disable PRs; but you can certainly say that you won't accept patches via GitHub in your CONTRIBUTING and/or README document.
All Cameras Are Police Cameras
Facebook is almost certainly further evolving Linux's existing TCP/IP stack, not developing a new one.
How to Pay Employees for Great Ideas
Demystifying Apple Pay
Github should have more project meta-data, rather than sifting through the README. For example, Production Status: experimental / alpha / it's complicated / production / paid support. Pull request status, standards, response time-frame and response time-frame history would be nice. Canonical URL could become a cross-VCS hosting standard that fixes the annoying "this project has moved" messages.

Simple configurations could change meta-data based on activity over time, or voting, or (?). Default settings like "Mark this repo Abandoned after 3 months without commits" would cleanup confusion for most small projects.
Amtrak issued a report saying that SNCF and other European rail companies only report "profits" because they have higher public subsidies which are unaccounted for.

http://www.amtrakoig.gov/sites/default/files/reports/E-08-02...
Poll: Is the quality of Google's services improving or worsening?
In general, do you think the quality of Google's services -- Drive, Android, Search, etc. -- is improving, worsening or par for the course?
Declining
Also don't forget Japan's Akatsuki space probe which will will attempt to insert itself in orbit around Venus in November.

It "missed" in 2010 due to an engine failure and had to wait 5 years for another attempt:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akatsuki_%28spacecraft%29
A job posting in August indicates a failed migration attempt that couldn't have started until October, because that's when the transaction closed?
Exactly. Fighters intercept bombers. Fighters intercept other fighters.
Bombers allow for cheap and reliable mass destruction of any ground target - compared to icbms and ground vehicles.

That these arguments come up only show how brain washed we are by the media.
> getting the job done is all that really matters

No matter what the language in question, that approach is why we read on HN about so many scaling failures, security breaches, and startups imploding upon success.

Just getting something "shipped" is never the same thing as "done". The latter requires polish, which can be applied in any language, but it takes time.
There've been a lot of Emacs submissions in the past week, people are just posting anything Emacs related for karma now.
Unattributed, but per Wikipedia: "In mid-2011, scheduled TGV trains operated at the highest speeds in conventional train service in the world,[citation needed] regularly reaching 320 km/h (200 mph) on the LGV Est, LGV Rhin-Rhône and the LGV Méditerranée." [0] You're right, though, that this is different than average speed.

Still, 300 mph would be a stretch goal for sure, but it doesn't seem ridiculous if you're starting from scratch today. The Shanghai system was built over a decade ago. At minimum, automated computer controls should be significantly improved.

I'm also operating with the assumption that the budget for such a project would be unlimited, since it's just a thought exercise.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV
Web Data Mining by Bing Liu (2007) [pdf]
You can just put that in the README, or make a fork if you're not the maintainer.
Extensive discussion from last month:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8582985

Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8712339
Extensive discussion from last month:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8582985
If planes have to account for delays, so do trains: the on-time performance of the Acela is comparable.
I see this situation differently. If you don't have time or energy to invest in reviewing PR, then you should say so on your project page clearly. And don't accept PR at all. It wouldn't waste other contributors time.

Otherwise say that you are looking for active contributors and give them PR access, if and when you get someone eligible.

Just accepting PR and doing a lottery on them is not useful for anyone.
Pedro Santos (Part. Gabs Alves) Performing Dona Aranha
looks like pull requests can't be though?