skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is sad for us all. Noirin was a lovely person, smart and motivated, dedicated to open source for many years, part of so many communities. I will miss them from geekfeminism and from all our open source and feminist activist circles.
Stabilizing the features used in the standard library is an ongoing process, yes.
Congrats to the team. Good stuff. Hopefully this means a drop in price (wishful thinking).
> If the best and the brightest of you are drawn to building addictive apps rather than making great journalism, important films, or literature that survives the test of time, will we as a society be ultimately impoverished?

The opportunity to create art still exists. Distribution channels are more varied now; they're more inclusive and perhaps (ironically?) less conducive to middle class salaries. But since when has creating art ever been about financial reimbursement? You're either creating or you aren't. The incentive exists for those that feel one, for those that have to create or go insane. If you "were going to be a novelist" but decided to be a programmer or an economist because you wanted to make money, well...

In the words of Shia Labeouf: "just do it."
An americo-centric view. Europe seems to do well with pur limited freedom of expression.
Yes, ergonomics suck. It's particularly frustrating since a lot of things that end up pooled are confined to current thread execution (e.g. request) and could easily be stack alloc'd if that facility was there. Along the same lines, sharing messages across threads where one would simply like to memcpy into a ringbuffer become a pain in the rear.
Microsoft Word became a valuable monopoly because it was a proprietary standard. But git hosting is a commodity service. There are already a number of players doing exactly what GitHub does, for less money, and it's trivially easy to migrate a repository away from GitHub to those other providers.

Something tells me that the "facebook for programmers" angle is essential to selling the dream here. The so-called "network effect" of open-source projects has some inherent stickiness, but again, there isn't that much that ties a project to GitHub.
> but the politics around it seemed to drag it down into not-productive territory

Hipsters moved to Go and Nodejs so hopefully it will be easier for the ruby community to focus on the code rather than big egos and petty fights.

I wish the former communities good luck with the hype and the arseholes that come with it.
I have a sneaking suspicion that we disagree on what should be a crime and what the penalties for certain crimes should be :)

I think injuring or killing a pedestrian with a car should always be a crime and should be severely punished.

I think sharing free software across international borders should never be a crime.
Maybe tangential, but i find myself reminded of a article/blog entry a year or more ago that talked about how the ISPs and big media was to blame for why we still don't have simple, practical ways of transferring files across the net.

Sadly i didn't bookmark it at the time, and i would like to revisit it and check some of the details.
yuck! why did you have 66 commits?
Thank you for mentioning Noirin's work with digital rights and other organizations.

I didn't know about their work as a medic. Thank you also for mentioning their family's thoughts.
> because it sounds hard to me to show off (adequately) skills I've spent decades acquiring with less than a day's worth of aimless work

So you would be against a developer test too then?

> (e.g. cooking, acting, music) will expect you to do it live, on the spot.

Fair enough. So the developer equivalent should be a 1 hour technical interview, with perhaps a coding exercise on a computer within that hour. I am happy with those. To reduce the pressure the interviewer could leave the room for 10 mins while you code something. It is the do 4 hours work in your own time for a chance to get an interview or get to the next round that bugs me. And in reality I'd spend 8 just to maximize the chance of getting the job.

> your pet open-source project is a jQuery plugin that makes web page backgrounds sparkly

Yes there are sub divisions in the 'software developer' category. If you want a machine learning job you kind of have to demonstrate it one way or another. I argue that the option to show your existing code rather than do additional work on a made up problem is valuable.
IMO, the current state of the F-35 rather suggests it doesn't.
The post pretty clearly says:

> To solve the problem of interview anxiety, we're adding a second track to our interview process at Triplebyte. Applicants, if they choose, will be able go through our process by completing programming projects on their own time.

> The project-based track will require a larger time commitment (and we expect lots of people to stick with the standard track for this reason).
I 100% believe GitHub has the right to police and enforce their own standards on their system - just wanted to make that clear first. This is not about the r-word issue for me.

What I find unsettling is that what they could consider "objectionable" is wide open and resolution of raised issues is expected so rapidly. Silly story time..

A developer in MajorCorp leaves a code comment (which is eventually committed) saying "// TODO: Fix this later, GitHub is down again, GitHub is trash!". GitHub could fairly request its removal as it is likely to be objectionable to them.

However, the main contact on the account is away at a conference and gets to their email a couple of days later. Is their repo or even their entire account now toast? How much would someone want to bet against that?

This is a farfetched contrived story, but now there's a demonstrated (again, assuming the screenshot is legit) attempt to enforce this clause and evidence of "24 hours" being the timeframe allowed for resolution, the tiny risk of such an outcome is going to hit sentiment and get legal departments twitching.

(My personal suspicion is paying and enterprise users will not receive such threats, but in the above example I'm being idealistic and assuming everyone gets equal treatment.)
Software that is licensed per-server has a higher burden than just the license's purchase price: you have to actually keep track of those licenses so that you can plan and optimize license capacity (even if you have a site license) along with real things like server and network capacity. To me, as someone who works exclusively in open source environments, that is a heavy burden and I don't buy software that is licensed per-machine.

To get an idea of the difference in overhead costs I think it's helpful to look at Amazon's pricing between un-licensed Linux and licensed Windows instances. An m3.2xlarge instance with Linux is $0.532/hr whereas the same instance with Windows is $1.036/hr. That is a pretty big difference.

I'm not certain, but I'm guessing the difference boils down to two costs for Amazon:

1. The cost from Microsoft of a license of Windows
2. The cost of dealing with licensing Windows
3. The cost of support from Microsoft

52% cost overhead does seem a bit high, and I bet you could do better than that yourself, but I also don't think it is trivial. Just looking around to figure out the cost of licensing things for this comment was draining.
Problem solved! Instead of calling someone who is not mentally disabled "retard" as an insult we should all now call them "mentally disabled".

So next time someone who is not mentally disabled cuts you off in traffic just yell out "You're a mentally disabled individual!"

The underlying issue has nothing to do with the word but the meaning, you can kill the word but the meaning will be attached to something else. People who don't have respect for the mentally disabled will not be changed by censoring a word.

#sigh

Note: I don't endorse actually calling anyone mentally disabled, retarded, slow etc.. We should try to be better humans then that and treat people with the respect they deserve.
We already have laws saying that you cannot pirate music. It's called copyright law. The problem is that a lot of people want us to have laws saying that anyone who completely unknowingly facilitates copyright infringement should be punished. This means that any time someone can find pirated content by searching Google, Google would have broken the law, even though it's all automated and Google has no way of knowing that it's pirated. In fact, we already have a law called the DMCA that is supposed to deal with this, by establishing the "safe harbor" provision as well as a means by which IP owners can require service providers to remove infringing content, but that doesn't satisfy everyone.

So in this analogy, our copyright law is like the laws on cars. We already have laws saying you can't drive cars past the speed limit, or do other various things with them. But we don't have any laws for wheel manufacturers that say that their manufactured wheels cannot be used by someone else in the commission of a crime. Penalizing Google for inadvertently allowing someone to find a page (hosted by a third party) that contains copyrighted content is like fining a wheel manufacturer any time one of their wheels is used as a component of a car that was used to rob a bank. Besides being patently ridiculous, there's no way for a wheel manufacturer to know which cars are going to be used to rob banks.
Well, they could buy Sourceforge and Slashdot. Though that might end up a distraction...
It seems like a more realistic/useful current valuation than many of these pie-in-the-sky valuations or acquisitions, given that they actually have real revenue, do a useful thing, etc... seems about right to me for today. Surely that will grow- and that's what they are hoping on.
I'm not aware of Microsoft Word or any editor I've ever used or heard of forbidding me from using the word "retards" or any other. Heck, Gnu Emacs allows me to write proprietary software, a user freedom RMS is no doubt not entirely happy with.

I require that general freedom of expression in my tools and do no tolerate vendors who engage in these sorts of damaging stunts. I suspect I'm not alone, and I note GitHub has a further problem of not being all that sticky, e.g. I moved all my repos off it earlier today after we got confirmation of this.
Sorry to say, but any time I need a private repo I just head to BitBucket.

By which you further validate the market for them and for investors.
> java low latency space where even young GCs are a problem ... there are other reasons to avoid any GC in this space

I'm no Java hater, but that sounds like the wrong place to use Java in the first place
She was also on the Board of the Apache Software Foundation.
You simply aren't using enough hammers!

Though seriously, I think the term landmine is loaded toward using patents exclusively as a troll. A wider analogy could be like a toll bridge, where the builder should be compensated by travelers. Some tolls could be usurious, but that wouldn't invalidate the whole principle.
The author can write well, but his main point is frankly dumb and reads like a plant from an industry pressure group.

He cites two main facts: that record company and movie industry conglomerates have lost profits, and that tech companies have gained profits. He then asserts that this is due to some sort of implied theft. That's completely asinine.

The posters below implying this is part of the Hollywood Smear campaign are quite possibly right.
Another thing you could do is add an analog input ('virtual joystick') in the corner. Basically, a little box which someone could touch/click inside of to start moving the arrow with a specific turning radius + velocity.
What if a drone costs 100x less than a delivery driver? You can have 100 drones out delivery packages for the same cost of one delivery driver delivering one package at a time.

It would be interesting to see data on what % of amazon purchases are above the payload of a drone - i imagine they crunched the numbers themselves and determined it was low enough to justify continuing to push this issue (even after the FAA tried to ban[1] drone deliveries altogether)

Theyll look at $/package and time/package for drones and delivery drivers.

I imagine once you account for driver salary and benefits, cost of vehicles, cost of fuel and maintenance, cost of insurance for drivers and vehicles, cost of management structure to maintain drivers, schedules, routes, etc - the $/package for drones likely make up for any disadvantage they currently have in time/package

Also, drones can deliver packages 24/7/365, no reason you cant wake up to a package delivered overnight (maybe even your morning kindle (tm) e-ink newspaper)

[1]http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/24/faa-bans-the-use-of-drones-...
We're not "promoting" anything. Science should have no agenda. If NOAA changed numbers, that's scientific fraud. Promoting objective science is never a bad thing. Even the word "climate change denial" is loaded. Nobody is denying the climate is changing, people are debating the changes themselves and the causes of those changes. Dismissing a piece of data because it goes against your global-warming religious beliefs is your right. However, an opinion ought not be construed as "settled science."
Oh as a number of people have indicated

its bad for the company because the candidate can work with someone else and produce a glowing submission. I have helped a number of people do these some that have gotten the job.

its bad for the interviewee. They may spend 10-15 hours on this and get rejected for no reason at all. Do you think the person reviewing the submission is putting multiple hours into it. Doubtful.

If the intent is truly(and I mean truly) help individuals that struggle with traditional interviewing techniques then kudos. Demonstrate this by allowing candidates to interview in a way that is comfortable for them(including not taking your take home test) If its the company saying "my time is more valuable than yours. Do this assignment then we'll talk" then no thanks.
That's funny, I still find YouTube quite useful as a utility even though I can't upload all 172 episodes of Seinfeld.
People writing frontend learn how to pool objects very quickly in both iOS and Android for list/collection view cells.
Sort of, but as long as all drones (in this airspace) are automated, it's still an easier problem than self-driving cars. Just detecting where a road is is a feat, and then throw in other traffic, and then say that traffic is driven by people, who tend to behave irrationally by a computer's/programmer's typical definitions of "rational". Then there are traffic controls, construction, and the like.

Amazon's idea is to have airspace dedicated to autonomous drones, who can go from a to b in a straight line and mostly just have to worry about not hitting other drones (or buildings or birds or what have you). You can do that with some decent sensors and some simple physics simulations.

That's not to say that airspace is totally unregulated, but the regulations tend to be much broader (AFAIK; I'm not a pilot).
F# is what the cool former C# developers are using nowdays. It's either that or node.js embrace. Go figure.
When placing an engineer in a company can net you $8,000 to $25,000 you can very well say Github is undervalued. I certainly think it should be more valuable to RHT.
Rationally, it doesn't matter whether you have empathy or not. But you need to demonstrate rational understanding of the issues, and I don't think you've done that here.

There's a lot of evidence that open offices destroy productivity, and almost no evidence that they increase it.

So whatever your reasoning hiring people, paying them a lot of money, and then making it harder for them to do their jobs is an irrational position.
No, you seem to be talking about whether certain behaviour involving cars should be allowed. That's not the issue in the article, or being discussed here. The issue is whether it's a good idea to design computers to allow certain actions in the first place. Since fundamentally we can't design computers to detect 'bad' search queries, any attempt would likely be like other forms of DRM: futile against the sort of people you want to stop, and debilitating for everyone else.
In my view, if industry wants such a lavish public gift as the privileged use of airspace, it should come with plenty of strings attached.

Drones should be licensed and carry liability insurance. They should emit an ID signal that includes their GPS coordinates. They should respond to a "scram" signal that clears an area for things like rescue helicopters and firefighting aircraft. They should not carry advertising banners or emit noise pollution. There are already analogous rules for cars in most of these areas.

There's also a laundry list of items regarding data privacy that should apply to drones.
Unfortunately, most companies aren't comfortable replacing an onsite with a work sample (or take home.) So, it's just additive.

It's not "the worst" in relation to other interview options. It's the worst because it's usually in addition to other interview options. I just stopped doing take homes on my last round of interviewing. Just not worth it. It was always just added work. It never replaced a stage of the process.

If you think about it, it makes sense though. Very few companies would hire people directly based on the strength of their github account or their topcoder rank. So, if they won't do that, then what extra information does a take home really provide?

Companies seem to recognize that they want to hire people who do good work and that good work isn't done in an interview setting. But very few companies are willing to just analyze the candidate's work. They want to subjectively judge the person.
Because if you want good support, such as OS lifecycles longer than a couple years, they're actually fairly inexpensive. RHEL starts at $350 a year to get you the same kind and length of support you'll get from a $300 MS subscription. Yes, the retail price for an MS OS is high, but if you're going to be doing server deployments, you'll be getting your software from direct resellers, who do provide much more reasonable prices.
Sure, I can understand that. But that is based on the notion that Github will stay the way it is, simply a place for collaboration. However, it can amount to so much more, it can spin out its own careers site, like stackoverflow did. The point I'm trying to make is that Github has ludicrous potential, and if you value it based on that 2bn seems rather low.
Stack for sure. But if you want any kind of persistence then stack is right out and an object pool would be faster.
There are plenty of patents listed at http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avc-att1.p..., http://mp3licensing.com/patents/ and http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/hevc/Documents/hevc-att1....
It has its pros/cons but you'd be surprised (perhaps) at the throughput and latency you can get if you're mindful of things to avoid.
If this is a forgotten trick, then why did we learn about this in school? It was in Java classes though, never heard of it being needed elsewhere, but the concept is generally applicable.
> Bring me into your professional office. Let's talk like professionals. Allow me to demonstrate my professional skills. Call me back with a professional yes or a professional no, all within a professional time frame. That's it.

What if your professional skills are such that it's not possible to demonstrate them in an hour or two at someone else's office--either because of the nature of the skills, or because you're one of the many excellent programmers whose work suffers when there's someone actively staring at you, like the guy in the article?

Let's be honest. Programming as a discipline attracts a disproportionate number of people for whom social skills do not come easily. Granted, you don't want to hire a grumbling misanthrope who refuses to take direction, but you also don't want to turn away a perfectly good team player who lacks the largely irrelevant skill of gladhanding under pressure.

I think a lot of the comments in discussions like this come from programmers who do have solid social skills, and there's certainly nothing wrong with that, but an interview process that gives you personally a fair evaluation is not necessarily the most reliable one for programmers in general.
That's what he was saying. When companies move to enterprise, they pay per-user instead of per-repo.
Well, it cost them my $7/mo. That decision was very disturbing to me - I've always viewed GitHub as a content-neutral platform which provided a code hosting and sharing service. Yesterday's incident seems to signal that they are willing to make political judgments about peoples' code and force their opinions into that code, and I'm just really not okay with that. This wasn't about removing something which posed a legal or material threat to GitHub or its users - this was about controlling expression to force compliance with a political agenda. Which, by the way, GitHub is well within its rights to do, but which I find extraordinarily distasteful.

I'm not willing to say it "will fall soon", but it has substantially damaged my opinion of GitHub as a company, and has diminished my trust in the integrity of their service as it serves the needs of open-source communities.
Ask HN: Python or Go?
I have a strong background (8 years) in PHP development with Drupal and other misc frameworks/components. I'm a comaintainer for a system called Aegir, which is a free software control panel for managing large fleets of Drupal sites. Aegir is currently written in all PHP, including a daemon for running background tasks (which is not a good thing).

We're in the process of re-architecting Aegir to be a frontend + simplified API for Kubernetes or other prerolled container management systems (Flynn, Deis, etc). Our goal is to create a superset of what Aegir supports.

Anyway, we determined very quickly that PHP is not a very good language for the majority of what we're building. We've narrowed down the alternatives to Python or Go, and we're wondering if there's any strong, technical reason to go with one or the other for systems/container orchestration type work.
Probably not. No deal at that scale is done at list rates.

But it'd still be a very lucrative deal for GH if it happened.
The most interesting thing about all these massive fund raisings is why. It is almost as if the managers of these companies think we are about to enter a period where raising funds will be impossible, revenue from servicing the startup economy will dry up, and they will need a massive war chest to survive.
It's simply incorrect to say that private companies cannot engage in censorship.

If they have enough control over a medium to effectively suppress speech, then yes. The argument is whether that is the case here. The definition of censorship is not merely "any case where someone prevents someone from saying something". The bar is higher than that.
It’s a decent summary, but—as someone who was part of the team back when we started the project—the goal of RubySpec was always to be the test suite and specification of the Ruby language, and for the Ruby community. It wasn’t about Rubinius, and it wasn’t an afterthought.

I’ve been out of the Rubinius (and Ruby) scene for several years now, so I can’t speak much to the rest… but unfortunately the personality clashing seems sadly familiar.
Yes, it was my fault, I am a GitHub customer but never realized they have a specific enterprise option.
Founder here. We definitely don't and the outcome of both tracks will be treated exactly the same way. As Ammon wrote it: "Anyone who passes our take-home project assessment will get exactly the same service from us as people who do the regular interviews. We'll work hard to find several YC startups they'd be a great fit for, fast track them through the hiring processes, and handle all logistics of flights/accommodations/scheduling."
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