gustavo_duarte's comments

This is an interesting argument, and it's hard to say anything without data, which would be hard to measure imo.

As a counter, my intuition is that masks also remind people of the risks and actually encourage safe behavior. I feel this in myself, a greater awareness of the pandemic, a nudge towards being more careful. Extending your analogy, it's as if the seatbelt reminded people that there are some pretty grisly accidents out there, and maybe they should take it easy.

Both effects probably exist, not sure what wins out, and how much it matters.

Hi brw,

Your code remains living in its original repo. To keep things easy, it'll support only GitHub repos at first, then any Git repo, then potentially other source control software.

Here's what Shapiro says:

"The word "hacker" in its well-known computing sense has a first citation of 1971 (contributed by me) in the Historical Dictionary of American Slang. Here is an earlier citation, not precisely in a computing context but obviously the same term"

I interpret that as the only condition on the citation being "the well-known computing sense." He's definitely not saying "with negative connotations."

Even the phreaking stuff from the Tech is "not precisely in a computing context". I don't think the TMRC citation qualifies here, it's a very specific and different context (check some of its sibling entries), even if it shares some of that early magical MIT spirit.

But even then, the TMRC does also say:

"HACK: 1) something done without constructive end"

So, all in all, even taking the TMRC into account I think the origin of the word was already ambiguous, which it is. I think the small dash of mischievousness adds to the flavor of hacking.

Further down the article there are other examples:

  The “sources of material” included many people the
  Nazis sentenced to death for minor crimes, such as
  looting, and many convicted for political crimes that 
  particularly incensed the regime, ranging from treason to 
  the vague offense of “defeatism.”

As an example of this, Elfriede Scholz was sentenced to death for “undermining morale” in 1943 for saying she thought the war was lost.

I agree with you that the post is soft on Obama, and personally I'm disappointed with the Administration in general.

However, I think the main point of the article still holds and is important in our fight towards a stronger rule of law.

There's a political game being played here, and we need to see it clearly. I don't mean to defend Obama at all, but _any_ administration is under extreme pressure to "fight terrorism" and this creates a huge distortion between the actual risks and consequences of an attack compared to the measures taken by the Executive branch to: 1) avoid attacks, and 2) create the perception they're doing all they can to avoid attacks. There are also other players, like the defense industry, federal departments, etc., with their own interests at play.

Remember DFW's commencement speech? [0] In our situation the political game _is_ the water. We need to see it clearly to fight back and keep our societies lawful and free. While logic is important, it's not going to win an essentially political battle.

0: http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/david-foster-wallace-in...

I think the Economist did a great job on this in their recent piece:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/06/wh...

Think about the incentives to the _President_ (whoever that is) to NOT let an attack happen, no matter what the cost. As Daniel says, it's not about numerical risk or objective damage, it's perception. Obama would have done anything not to have an attack during his terms.

And that's the really sad part. Due to the political process, different interests, and so on, the terrorists WERE able to inflict grievous damage to us as a society.

I agree completely on the GH slow down / fail whale type of problems.

I use GH for about 12 hours a day almost every day, between open source and client projects. I face slow downs in the issue tracker, the git repos themselves (I only use command line), and the web interface to browse a project (code, history, pull requests). I notice a slow down about once a day. Some features, like the contributors graph, are always dead slow. About 10-20% of PR merge attempts fail, and I have to click the button again, sometimes multiple times. I see the Unicorn fail page or some Octocat fail page often enough.

It makes me think exactly of what you describe, a combination of Rails perf / scalability and perhaps a lack of strong backend engineering, I'm not sure.

Right now the problems are in the level of a mild annoyance / surprise that a company like GH has these issues. If it gets worse, I would consider moving away. But because I truly love the UI and overall functionality, it's a positive tradeoff for us at the moment.

You're very welcome regarding the YouTrack suggestion.

I understand the frustration with GH limitations (no burn charts and hardly any reporting). For us, the minimalism ended up working in harmony with our process, but I can see situations where it wouldn't.

The UI and milestones, though, I think are good. JIRA is to me the king of clunky. I've used it in 3 projects over the years and evaluated it last year, and I've been pretty disappointed with it.

To borrow from another comment here, it has a bit of a Bugzilla feel, like it just grew and grew, and you have tons of fields and features, but they're poorly designed and put together. A bit of a mess, to put it bluntly. FogBugz has a similar feel to me.

I encourage you to check out JetBrains' YouTrack. I never used it in a project, but a couple days evaluating gave me a good impression. Good luck with your search.

This is a great point. We have ~10 repos as part of our product, so we faced the same issue.

After toying with different solutions, we settled on using two dedicated issues-only repositories. One of them handles software development (all bugs, feature requests, the engineering stuff) and the other handles operational stuff like client installs and so on.

This has worked well for us. Here are some advantages:

0. We get the big picture you mentioned, which is the crucial point. Planning, grouping issues for releases, etc., becomes much easier.

1. When it comes to access security, we can give people access to the issues repositories (via GH teams) without giving them access to the full source code.

2. Splitting operations and engineering increases focus. Engineers don't need to look at client installs, etc.

3. We can still reference repo issues in commits to other repositories. See [0] and [1]

So all in all, I agree the fragmentation is a real problem, and I think centralized issues-only repos are the way to go. Hope this helps.

0: https://github.com/blog/1439-closing-issues-across-repositor...

1: https://github.com/blog/967-github-secrets

Agreed, email is clunky.

Have you used the GitHub mobile apps though? I find it's a decent way to keep tabs on issues, add comments, etc., when one is away from a bigger computer. I see that as a big plus for GH.

I respectfully disagree regarding Fogbugz vs. GitHub issues.

I used FogBugz for about 6 years in a major client project (a successful SaaS product). We used FogCreek's hosted solution and were pretty heavy users: different projects, milestones, feature requests, user communication, etc. However, we were unhappy with FogBugz. The UI always felt clunky and slow to navigate, it felt like we were battling FB rather than getting help from it. In particular, milestone / release management and issue grouping were painful.

Then late last year we moved our repos to GH, and decided to look for another issue management system. We evaluated several: JIRA sucked hard imho, JetBrains YouTrack was my favorite full-featured product.

But then we decided to give GH issue management a try. It is minimalist and surely lacked some features, but hey, if it could handle our needs, the simplicity would be a huge plus.

A few months later, _everyone_ in the team is thrilled: devs, testers, support personnel. Using milestones and labels we have been able to manage more people and more work on GH (we're growing) with less hassle. It feels much friendlier than FogBugz. Now whenever I create / solve / assign / organize issues, I feel happy, whereas before it was a dreaded chore.

YMMV of course, but I wanted to give my 2c since I do have a lot of experience with both issue managers.

My experiences with hiring and paying overseas devs have been pretty easy (I'm in the US).

We have paid using SWIFT transfers, which sometimes require a bit of work to set up, but nothing too onerous - it's like doing any complicated transaction at a bank. Once set up, the recurring payments are generally trivial - as you said, we get an invoice, send payment, and things are merry.

Tax-wise this is an expense like any other to our US-based company. Note that in this case the developers actually LIVE overseas. If somebody is in the US but is not a resident / authorized to work, then it's a whole different story.

It is a much better set up if the overseas worker can set up their own company, especially in the case of Brazil. Then the US company does not need to worry about any of this, they simply wire (via SWIFT) payments monthly, for example, and there is very little overhead to the US company.

In the case of Brazil, the worker is also better off in this set up in general, as they'll end up paying a corporate tax rate, which will be much lower.

Hi speeder,

I have hired a number of devs in Brazil for telecommuting work in the past. We've done a fair amount of mobile dev, but mostly it's HTML / JS single load apps, not usually native iOS, and mostly apps, not games. I'm not sure if that would be a fit for you.

If you're interested, send me a resume please, and who knows? I may not have anything right now, but things come up here and there. Best of luck.

But why can't Dropbox become the main provider for this fully cloud-hosted architecture? So I keep my cloud files in Dropbox, and grant my cloud apps access to subsets of those files. Then they would truly be the "filesystem of the web" and the growth/profit prospects are rosy.

For example, http://leanpub.com/ uses Dropbox in an interesting way. As Dropbox beefs up their API and adds features, I think there are many interesting growth/monetization possibilities. I think the main danger is the competition from Google/Apple/MS.

The two top-rated entries in the HN comments for PG's essay are disagreements, both stating that the essay is flawed. I'm not so sure the groupthink is really that bad here on HN.

Agreed, but the charity bit was a special touch:

  In the spirit of the season, you might consider 
  donating it to the charity of your choice

Beats a standard "you keep it" corporate letter.

Very cool. Had it been Paypal, they'd want a picture of a burned X-Box surrounded by crying children to prove authenticity.

MS has been controversial commercially, but socially I think they've done a decent job of "Don't Be Evil", for example in their treatment of Gay and Lesbian employees - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_and_Lesbian_Employees_at_Mi...

Gates is rumored to have scored a perfect 800 on the math portion or his SAT. He was studying Math at Harvard and published a paper in 'Discrete Mathematics' despite having dropped out before finishing undergrad:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi... (pay wall, but you can see the abstract)

I think there's reason to believe he could have been an outstanding programmer. Has anybody read the source code for a program verifiably written by Gates? Was Donkey.bas really written by him?

Try reading A Journey Through Genius:

http://www.amazon.com/Journey-through-Genius-Theorems-Mathem...

The read part is _great_, and it gets you to do math in a way that flows pretty easily from the reading.