skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is what I want to see happen as well, but the software and the hardware just aren't there yet.

We don't have a well-polished OS that can seamlessly transition from a single-app-at-a-time smartphone UI to a simultaneous multi-app desktop UI depending on the size of the screens attached. Windows 10 comes close in terms of the transitions and polish, but only scales down to a tablet interface, rather than smartphone. The Ubuntu attempts at this just severely lack polish when trying to use it as a phone.

On the hardware side, ARM is too limiting in terms of software availability, and x86 just doesn't have anything that fits in a smartphone power envelop and can also handle a much heavier workload when used as a typical workstation.

We're seeing some rapid progress on both fronts though, so I'm hopeful it won't be too long before someone finds the right formula.
There is no right answer to this question, nor no clear line. We all have to decide where we draws the line between accommodation and self-determination.

And the line moves over time, not always for the better.
Hey, at least we'll get a bunch more mostly-pointless JavaScript features to support accessibility on canvases!
Previously on Hacker News (in no particular order):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8909529

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8872085

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2122826

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8368788

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6701607

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6838434

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3553983

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1666445

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43978

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2090256

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1989473
It's not the word that's offensive, but rather the insult. Is it offensive to say "retard the cam by 15 degrees"?
Yes it is the context! "retard" is a short form of "mentally retarded". Which means slowed down developmentally. The spark plug gaps being a little too wide in the old noggin to fire reliably.

This is not like a completely separate context like "fag" (cigarette) versus "fag" (homosexual).

The long form "mentally retarded" isn't offensive, yet "mental retard" is so offensive that it violates terms of service and gets you a shutdown threat?

Absurd.

> there's no indication that this was some sort of automated email that was sent purely because a use of the word was detected.

I would find the action less distasteful if it was such a bot. That would still leave open the possibility that the bot isn't expressing its author's intent.
For TPC-C like benchmarks, you can run:
1) CloudHarmony: https://github.com/cloudharmony/oltpbench
2) Percona: https://code.launchpad.net/~perconadev/perconatools/tpcc-mys...

We've found it easier to load large datasets using CloudHarmony but have run both.

I'd recommend reading through http://d0.awsstatic.com/product-marketing/Aurora/RDS_Aurora_.... It is oriented towards SysBench, but will help you set up your clients to have enough network throughput to run a full test.

Generally, we find the performance comparison improves on large instances, high throughput workloads, or when the data set does not fit in RAM.
You don't think standards of professionalism have a place in open source, or on GitHub?
'Retard' has no meaning or use?

https://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=bks&q=retard&num=10

Also, please be careful how you use the word 'vegetable.' My aunt is in a coma, and many people find that offensive.
No 'degauss' button on those CRTs? :)
Not only did they ask them to change the name / verbiage; in a particularly Stalinist twist they asked them to delete it from the entire history.
You certainly act like you don't understand.
For git, literally all you need is a server with Git and SSH installed.
I like how the parent repo hasn't been taken down.

https://github.com/WebMBro/WebMConverter
Oh no, what would happen to https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck?
Your first three questions/answers, summarized, is that "Github ethically and legally removed an offensive word"

Should they? Yes.

I feel slippery slope arguments get brought up way too much sometimes. Every issue is turning into a binary all-or-nothing ordeal, with no room for nuance or context.

As long as what Github did is 1. ethical (removing a generally accepted as offensive word), 2. legal, then I see no problem with it.

If, IF Github starts making more arbitrary calls, then I think its the time to be angry or worried.
Aurora isn't implemented based on either Galera or NDB.
I didn't think that the OS X license let you run it anywhere other than Apple hardware. That's just something I've heard though, never actually investigated it.
IMO a clickbait
Say whatever you like. Do it on your own resources. And when you run a server, boot off whoever you like for acting against whatever standards or lack of standards you choose to have. And if you run a bookstore, you're welcome to carry or not carry whatever books you like.
Nobody would take their laptop out to take a picture, but plenty of people use Skype on a laptop.

Maybe it's a quirk of history that modern phones are named after the telephone; most phone usage involves reading text, not speaking or listening.
CIKM 2015 Machine Learning Competition
Isn't the name "git" (and therefore "github") itself considered pejorative? IIRC, Linus did name the tool after the British slang word.

"Git is a mild pejorative with origins in British English for a silly, incompetent, stupid, annoying, senile, elderly or childish person. It is usually an insult, more severe than twit or idiot but less severe than wanker, arsehole or (redacted)."

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(slang)

ps. Yes, I'm a prude. And yes, I redacted a word from the Wikipedia definition above.
Aah, brilliant -- and they even have a book :D thanks for the recommendation!
>And if they said it in front of me, I'd have every right to kick them, hard.

Where do you live? In most countries, that would be assault, and is considered a crime.
sure, they're legally entitled to do whatever they want, but you're failing to consider the most important point:

>You need to consider that GitHub currently hosts a large percentage of the web's open source repositories

would you be happy if google abused its position as the leading search engine to favor right leaning websites over left leaning websites? what about censoring websites that are "offensive" to muslims?
How about the "Idiot's Guide To WebM" or "WebM for Dummies". Are those OK? I guess I'm not seeing the difference..
Our solution maintains the data in a simpler scheme because keeping the data in a maintainable format is important aspect when the data is ever changing - every couple of days millions of people update their preferences and we need to be able to apply these changes. When choosing a single data structure for all the numbers, we need to optimize for space or for faster inserts/updates. Our solution is a trade-off between these options.
I am Nothing (2011)
it is a per-instance number. For those SysBench numbers, we are running an r3.8xlarge instance type.
>Some people are scared of the AI and Cloud features of Windows 10 and compare it to Genisys in that Terminator: Genisys movie. I think that is made up and there is no threat of a Skynet network.

No one thinks that.
> It is the selective censorship of certain reasonable uses of free speech that is concerning here.

Free speech laws don't apply to corporate or private censorship.

> Who decides what is and is not appropriate?

The owners of the property. Can I come over to your place and say offensive things?
POSIX is actually pretty horrible, if you look at the details. Guess what the "close" function does (hint: you can't use it to close a window or a sale). It requires the use of three-letter paths like /tmp.

(Related fact: While Windows is still as bad in that it gets its own things wrong, at least they weren't tied to POSIX's filesystem layout)
A private company choosing not to allow content for whatever reason is not censorship. People who choose to use the word "retard" are not a protected class, Github can ban this word as they see fit.
Universal Edibility Test
There's lots of muckracking you can do in your free time these days. (Look at eg the plane spotters uncovering CIA torture flights.)
Book and Bed Hotel: hôtel atypique pour les bibliophiles au Japon
Android+Arsenal+-+Color+Picker+collection
For the people who don't refactor, the reason they usually give is: "There is no time to refactor".

My #1 reason to avoid refactoring code is because that code has been there, is battle tested and hasn't had a bug filed against it in months. That is not my first instinct, either. There are lots of things I see that I had written months ago that I badly want to rewrite every time I see it. I have to restrain myself because it's not just the time spent refactoring. It's writing tests (if you're into that sort of thing). It's getting QA to hammer on it some more. It's fixing all the little bugs that you thought you had fixed that you re-broke. It's all the little bugs you've never seen before because this is a new design and you're not perfect.

Most of the time, it's not worth the refactor, even if it does slow down adding future features to that particular area. There are, of course, two exceptions: 1) if you're constantly playing bug whack-a-mole on a particular section and 2) if a section of the code you're working on is constantly changing. I grasp every opportunity to hold a meeting, stand on the nearest chair, strike a dramatic pose and shout "We are rewriting the loading system... FROM SCRATCH!" My project manager then tells me to get down and lay off the coffee, but that's ok, I've had my moment.
With data dependent systems, I assume you pay for access to the data, not just for the ability to use a computer.
It's sad that they had to "ban" them instead of having the community boycott/ridicule/shun the repo. The latter would be a healthier approach.
Exactly -- it's not censorship when you give someone something for free but ask them to abide by your rules. If you want the freedom to say whatever you want, pay someone to host your repo or host it yourself.
It's as if we as humans have some kind of context-sensitive language recognition capability, and can tell when a word is being used as a slur or if it has entirely unrelated meanings. We're slightly smarter than regular expressions. And yes, I'd fully expect Github to ban those too.
Hillary Clinton Wants Islamic State Off Twitter
That means Chromium could not be hosted on GitHub anymore. The source contains 42 instances of "retard". So do probably many massive codebases.

Example: predictor.h line 537: "The queue is a priority queue that will accelerate sub-resource speculation, and retard resolutions suggested by page scans."

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/codesearch#chromium/src/c...
> Git is a mild pejorative with origins in British English for a silly, incompetent, stupid, annoying, senile, elderly or childish person. It is usually an insult, more severe than twit or idiot but less severe than wanker, arsehole or twat.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_%28slang%29
GitHub is not the center of the world. They are not establishing law. You can publish Mein Kampf if everyone else decides not to. You can edit the bible if you wish.

Or you can try to foster the development of a professional community by taking steps to prohibit needlessly offensive language.

You can publish whatever you like on your personal website and link to it from anywhere. I don't see how this is an over-reach of censorship.
Probably solid advice. Best of luck to you :)
Depends, is his place a known haven for sharing information, specifically designed to encourage and promote openness?
It's particularly ironic to see this coming from a site named GitHub:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/git#Etymology_1

IMHO as far as offensiveness is concerned, 'retard' is pretty far down the scale... and regardless of whether they have the right to do this, I think this whole "politically correct" movement is a pretty disturbing trend. It's basically encouraging people to become offended more easily, and turns straightforward easy-to-understand conversations into watered-down vague doublespeak-ish verbiage. (If you've worked in any large organisations with similar policies, you'll know what I mean. I left that culture behind years ago and don't regret it one bit.)

Are there any GitHub equivalents that support the ideas of free speech and expression (within what the law allows)?
IE used to be the top browser, but look at how many other browsers implemented DirectShow filters. (Even on non-Windows platforms they should be emulateable)
Which Programming Languages Get Used Most at Hackathons?
When you state that the template is too complicated to be derived by chance in a single, finite Universe, I think you are not fully grasping the massive parallelism of this process across the Earth's surface, multiplied by the vast time scale involved, multiplied by the number of planets in the observable Universe.
Lots of misuse of the word "censorship" here and any time this subject comes up generally, not just on this site but anywhere the topic is discussed.

What is/are the root issue(s) of this mistaken belief? I typed a few possibilities but they sounded preposterous so I just deleted all that.

Could someone who thinks this is censorship please explain why Github doesn't have the right to control its own privately owned website, and how one single website monitoring the language used there is equivalent to a government "universally" (well, within its borders) coercively prohibiting all such content, such that the person in question is prevented from publishing it anywhere else, even by themselves?
>The long form "mentally retarded" isn't offensive

I beg to differ. There's a reason the medical community doesn't use that term anymore.
Github is not a public service; they're a private company.

> Who decides what is and is not appropriate?

Github does. That's how that works.

If you prefer you could try and lobby your government to set up some sort of national source code repo. Maybe you'd find the rules on such a thing more to your liking. (Note: You really, really wouldn't.)

Alternatively, you could host your own source code repos, and then you can set the rules.

Edit: More generally, you seem to suggest that a place where a lot of people from different backgrounds come together to try and collaborate and work should be a place with no rules, norms, or even an expectation of basic politeness. Offhand, I'd think the opposite should be true.

You're also conflating something like, eg, efforts to get around the Chinese firewall with people who want to use slurs. People have, in my view, in intrinsic right to do both, but these are still not equivalent actions, and you're not going to reach a sensible conclusion until you abandon that moral relativism. Free speech is valuable, but not all speech is equally valuable.
I'd recommend Ubuntu -- especially if you're just starting out.
Literally nobody is claiming that this is illegal or against the GitHub ToS. The question is whether what they did was reasonable, and how this action impacts people's perception of them.
Actually though. The repo owner is part of a company that boasts 4chan as a client.
1) Yes, absolutely; they're creating a more friendly community, and that's a hard problem.

3) Profanity and derogatory language are not the same thing; the difference is critically important. Similarly, if you tell someone to FOAD, the FO isn't the most offensive part of that statement.
Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?
Github is an American company and the use of the word "git" in American English is not at all common. They may not know.

That said, I find this whole thing to be silly. What can you possibly get out of choosing to be the word police?
> or replaced it with git

Thank you so much for that. The irony is delicious.
Well, in the literal sense it is censorship, being the suppression of materials deemed objectionable on moral, political, military, or other grounds. A bit like a (likely American) TV censor might "bleep" a word they don't want to expose people's delicate sensibilities to.

I mean, that doesn't make it "evil", but a lot of people might say that censorship of any sort is a bit of a grey area. That whole "I disagree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it" thing.
The monetization model not looking for paying customers; the aim is to get some money from everyone even those not willing to pay. Solution is to seek new sites and technologies even if they are not convenient and publicize. if possible start your own also support financially. If free sites are to exist without corporate control, expectation also have to be low.
So, how'd that go over with the girl?
The "workaround" has nothing to do with Ethernet. Because Ethernet isn't reliable enough at detecting errors higher-level protocols now use better error detection mechanisms of their own.
That is the basic idea on such things, though distributed protocols become complex when you have to consider split-brain, multiple concurrent failures, etc which all can occur in large-scale events.

Aurora leverages Amazon RDS Multi-AZ in this area. Their implementation has been battle-tested over many years and many many db instances.
While I did not speak to censorship, nor did you in the comment I replied to, I do agree that blanket censorship is not good for anyone. That does not mean that casual discriminatory speech shouldn't be considered foul in general.

Insert bit here about it not being illegal or immoral to police discriminatory speech on a private service.
Free speech laws don't apply to corporate or private censorship.

Nobody's suggesting we sue or otherwise bring criminal charges against Github. Your response is a non-sequitur at best.

The owners of the property. Can I come over to your place and say offensive things?

Legally? Yes, you can.
Quac^H^H^H^HMedical professionals also don't use "stomach" to denote the abdomen. So what?

> any more

I.e. they did! Lay people still do.

Anyway, what matters here is not the standard used by the medical community. I suspect that if a github project had some code that "assists the mentally retarded", it would not bring on the TOS violation police.
Case in point: Ran update && upgrade on my server that runs a mailinabox container. Whoops, something broke and now the container doesn't recognize any of the owners or groups. Your family mail server is down while your wife is waiting on replies to job applications. Thankfully, it was fixed within a day, but I've had stressful weeks where I've considered just moving to fastmail instead of spending my limited time at home pounding on config files.
1. This isn't censorship of the type that is illegal or not allowed. It is a private company deciding a word was inappropriate.

2. It seems like most in this comment thread agree that this action, as a singular act, is a good thing. The word was offensive. Github asked the repo to change it. They did. The end.

3. As for the larger context, the problem with the frequent use of slippery slope arguments and cries of "censorship" is that people are choosing to die on some pretty ridiculous hills.

4. If or when Github actually does something truly abusive of their power to censor, then I'll worry.
It's not, and this isn't a big deal. I agree. But I'm bored and I hate seeing people censored over little things, drops in an ocean, so I'm sharing my opinion, which is that this doesn't accomplish anything useful in any way.
The Christian parable only applies if the puritans are in the minority. Judging by the comments in this HN thread alone, more people are in favor of whitewashing language than against.

I, for one, do not look forward to an internet where the only allowable form of humor is some combination of popsicle stick jokes and regurgitated memes.
Here:

BS: "going into production this year"

Possibly not BS: "going into production this year at 2x nam technology node with a y Gb part"

Many nvm memory technologies, including mram and PCM have been "in production" for quite many years, with << 1Gb parts on old technology nodes, that is.
Of course I think Github should have the right to do this, but I don't think they should do this in cases as silly as this one.

The free market doesn't always work here. Especially when it comes to the Internet. In this instance, sure they can host it anywhere they want and then not encounter problems, but that often doesn't work in other scenarios.

When some sites try to fork in that manner, due to censorship on the original, the forked site can end up with DDoS attacks, having their domains revoked, payment accounts frozen, hosting revoked, and so on, because groups will harass companies support, demanding that they stop supporting <offending site> for whatever reason, and almost all companies cave when this happens. Suddenly, forking isn't so easy.

I strongly suggest anyone who thinks this is a good thing to read this post (which this comment is similar to):
http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centrali...
I can definitely appreciate your story. Thank you for your heroic action - people like you are like the people who saved my life. I'd say better safe than sorry, but your story also shows the other flip side - you have to be careful as a rescuer as well.

The explanation on the linked website talks about how it can be difficult (and very dangerous) also for the rescuer, with the person grasping for life. I remember the initial panic I felt when I nearly drowned, but with nobody immediately around me, the panic was short and then followed by blackness as I fell unconscious.

Your story clearly points to the - how do I say it - lack of clarity when someone is drowning or not, and the dangers of rescuing as well. A person in that state of panic is simply in pure fight-or-flight mode trying to survive and that can be quite dangerous to rescuers.
You're not free to kick someone that calls you a retard. That is assault, which is a crime in most places on earth. I thought every adult would know that, but here we are.

Sticks and stones.
Yes, you should be. The problem is that people (perhaps you) are elevating something marginally offensive to something hateful and worth shutting down at all costs. The dragging down of minor offenses to serious offenses is a dangerous thing.

It's surprising how little intellectual honesty there is in modern society. It's even more surprising here that some people (perhaps you) are willing to abandon any rational thinking in favor of their feelings. You seemingly can't comprehend (or are willing to ignore) the logical conclusion to where we're headed.

It's ridiculous for GitHub to police the content on their site in this way. Where does it stop? Will they block commits with "trigger" words?
Check out the reading list on the Sys Admin Body of Knowledge web site: http://www.sabok.org/
Have _I_ ever claimed that Ethereum will "change humanity"?

(for those who don't know, I'm the founder :) )
I think that link says that SCTP (which no one uses) has better error detection, not Ethernet itself.
The difference is that fewer people would get offended by those.
I would guess Python is pretty high on the list
> Who decides what is and is not appropriate?

Or when. This is certainly not the only repository using that word. Nobody else is getting takedown notices.
Github can ban this word as they see fit.

And people can discuss whether that is or is not appropriate as they see fit. If enough people feel differently, that's when alternative services start to appear.
Those are similarly problematic for the same reasons.
https://github.com/vbuterin/scalability_paper/raw/master/sca... is the newest one. And here's a google doc modeling transaction throughput with that algo: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wyul_iIKZiAeUprqA2HP...
If your response to someone using the word "retard" is physical assault, I'd say the problem isn't with the other person.