Paying For Privacy? | Hacker News Reader

Paying For Privacy?

rayracine.github.io

44 pointsprecium46 comments

My team uses pull requests extensively. The master branch is considered good, clean, production-ready code. Anything you want to get into production gets there by way of a pull request. Want to add a feature? Fix a bug? Make a branch, do your thing, and create a pull request against master. The rest of the team reviews your code in the pull request; the comments in a pull request are an excellent feature. My job would be ridiculously harder without pull requests.

Right, I thought one of the big benefits about pull requests was that it let other devs easily view the diffs before merging a change in, not to mention making it easier for people to discuss the changes. I guess if you don't want to do that then it's easier to just pass around patches and merge.

Viewing changes in a pull request is no easier than viewing the changes in a patchset (or rather, if it is you're using the wrong tools). For an established team, a PR-based workflow and a mailing list based workflow (where you mail patchsets to the mailing list and discuss them there) are not very different, but PRs are a lot friendlier to outside contributors.

Exactly, the benefit of Github is exactly what it says on the tin:

    "Build software better, together."

Or, like it says on my Github mug:

    "Github: social coding."

Seriously, if it's just you the self hosting your git repos is much easier, cheaper, and you'll have a better handle on how git actually works. However, if you're on a team or dealing with other people, the collaborative features of Github are awesome.

Once again, the correct answer is "use the right tool for the job."

I find pull requests handy for working with semi-technical people, for repos only worked on by programmers we just use the format-patch/email workflow, and we have access to each others public repos (would be called "forks" in github parlance I guess).

It's a much better system, faster, more powerful and more flexible but not centralized and you have to understand what you are doing.

It's not like this is a feature github discovered and added. They made an easier, prettier and less powerful version of an existing feature. Certainly not a bad idea, git's command line UI is ridiculously bad UI so a super simple point and click interface was a fantastic way to grab market share and get non-command line people involved.

> the comments in a pull request are an excellent feature

Really? I mean, compared to nothing I guess it would seem great. But since I'm used to an email thread serving the same purpose those comments on github pull requests seem awful to me.

Off topic: People who use Mother Teresa as the canonical example of selfless altruism need to read something about Mother Teresa so they don't look so silly.

Yeah, no kidding. Feeding and providing medical care for the Untouchables in India? She should have made an iPhone app to help find friends in restaurants nearby, that would have made he a real selfless altriust.

in her letters she said she was forbiden to provide actual health care. all they gave was a place for the sick to convalesce.

also, she and most othe rreligious still advocate over population and against several sane health treatments. not to mention education.

no little good religion does compensate for the long term damage.

They were given medicine, not just a place to convelesce, but even just providing a place to convalesce is a great mercy to people who were (and often still are) dying on the sides of the street, thrown away by their society as if they were nothing more than trash.

But then, what do I know, I am sure that you must know vastly more than I do, seeing as to how as a Christian I must advocate against education now. I should write letters to all of the universities I have attended, asking them to please revoke my diplomas on the basis of my religious freedom.

> she and most othe rreligious still advocate over population and against several sane health treatments. not to mention education

What you talkin' 'bout Willis?

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_wor...

http://m.timesofindia.com/world/uk/Mother-Teresa-saint-of-th...

Hitchens is not an unbiased citation, not even close. He routinely engaged in character denigration of several religious individuals, most notably Mother Teresa. The main argument he seems to have had with her is that he didn't think religious people should be allowed to have political opinions, and she did. Here is a thorough review of his vitriol against her:

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2013/04/mother-teresa...

What is the most telling is the response to Hitchens from the order she founded, on hearing about his death.

Despite Hitchens' vicious attacks on Mother Teresa over the years, the saint's order in India, Missionaries of Charity, said that it would offer prayers for the renowned atheist upon hearing of his passing late Thursday night at the age of 62, after a battle with cancer.

“We will pray for him and for his family,” spokeswoman for the order Sister Christie told Agence France-Presse.

http://www.christianpost.com/news/the-atheist-vs-the-saint-w...

That review doesn't refute a any of Hiutchens' points. In the question of association with unsavory characters, the reply is to accuse him of having done the same, which might have made him an hypocrite but doesn't refute his claim.

On the matter of convincing the victims to forgive their aggressor, they confirm what he says.

As for the Albania issue, they cling to an incorrect but completely irrelevant historical fact he gets wrong, avoiding having to deal with the actual point, which is whether Mother Teresa actually supported it or not.

I don't know if Hitchens was right, but if the best her supporters can come up with is a reply filled with deceit and red herrings, I'm starting to think maybe he was on to something.

What is the most telling is the response to Hitchens from the order she founded, on hearing about his death.

That's the same reply any Catholic organization gives whenever someone dies, except maybe for cruel dictators. I'm not criticizing it, but it tells us absolutely nothing.

A lot of people involved with politics are unsavory characters. How is turning down their money going to help the dying in India? All it does is puff up someone's self-righteousness.

Hitchens is not the only one who has come out against Mother Theresa. Here's a recent study by the University of Montreal:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-03/uom-mta022813...

They really don't get altruism at all, do they? The 'myth' of altruism? What is mythical about it? If they really want to understand it, they should try practicing it. Perhaps if they would write a few less papers and help out a few more poor people in their newly-found spare time, they might actually start to understand it.

I think their point was that the public perception of Mother Teresa's altruism is a myth created by a media campaign. That does not necessarily mean that she did not behave altruistically at times or that altruism itself is a myth, but that the person the public imagines never really lived. They point out her flaws and mistakes and unwillingness to help when she had the means to do so, so she's much like any other person who tries to do good.

The whole article of theirs is nothing but a rehash of Hitchens' book. This is just character assassination and nothing more.

http://www.catholicleague.org/canadian-atheists-rip-mother-t...

It is also telling that Hitchens' book had no citations for any of his claims either.

This is exactly what I was talking about.

When asked "Do you teach the poor to endure their lot?" Mother Teresa replied "I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people."

She was, until the end of her life anyway, a very devout Christian but her order was a bit fringe. She didn't really provide medical care, she referred to her facilities as "houses of the dying" and their suffering was a good thing as it brought them closer to God so pain management was basically non existent. There are reams of statements from medical professionals, Indian and Western, that visited her facilities and the general consensus was that they were "horrifying" and lacked even the most basic attention to cleanliness.

She did feed a lot of people, but not many compared to other charities operating in the same places that had smaller budgets.

I also can't dismiss the fact that she used her reputation to support war criminals like the Duvalier family, although in other comments you do dismiss this so ... sure, I'll just concentrate on the rest.

If you do believe in the christian afterlife then perhaps she is a great person as she probably did convert a lot of sick people in India as they suffered and became more likely to accept Jesus as their saviour. If you don't then she let poor people die unnecessarily and intentionally heaped unnecessary suffering on the poor.

So like I said, definitely, unequivocally, based on her own statements alone, she is not a good canonical example of selfless altruism since a good canonical example would not be judged only by a fringe sect of Christianity that looks to enhance the suffering of the poor.

Who would you use as an example?

Just a reminder, if you want a private Git repo, you can always use BitBucket, which provides you free private repos. And, it's also an excellent service in it's own right.

My public stuff all goes to github, and my private repos are all on BitBucket; virtually no cost to me that way and I use each service as it's promoted (imo).

In my opinion, and for almost any other remotely similar service, it's not about paying for privacy, it's about paying for convenience. You don't go home to get a beer, when you are going out, you pay extra money for the convenience of not having to carry around beer, an instead be able to buy it on the spot, in any wanted quanitity.

First, I applaud the "rugged individualist" style of netizenship that the OP is advocating. Hear hear.

But (and you knew that "but" was coming) github is particularly useful and not amenable to the kind of gaming that Facebook and Google have indulged in. Git is truly distributed, and if github ever tried to block or manipulate repos there are full copies all over the place. It would be very easy (and dare I say such action would come swiftly) to react to any such wayward behavior on the part of github, mainly because of the nature of git.

So: definitely host your own git repo, but if you use github for collaborating on public open source projects, you really aren't running any kind of risk that github will ever hinder your access or control in anyway.

I pay github for the same reason I pay heroku. It just works and I don't have to do anything. That is why they exist. Sure you can set up your own git server, but what do you do when it goes down?

The same thing you do when GitHub goes down...

PANIC and flock to HN to comment on a minor outage!!! - wait, no. git is a distributed system. You continue as you were and nothing changes.

Most likely, you have a full copy of the repo on the local disk, and can just push it to another remote.

In this way, DVCS's are resilient to individual server failure.

yet another article that values our time at $0. come on, we all make something like $80-130/hr.

Are you really going to spend less than 1 hour maintain this sort-of-github instance you have?

He gains not only hosting value from maintaining the instance, but also the experience. And the experience is a valuable asset that you can't really buy with money.

Obviously, a sort of pre-built image to spawn "own" Gitolite/Gitlab/whatever instance would be nice, so noone but those particularly interested in the process would have to spend their time setting things up. But I suspect such images/build scripts already exist, it's just that I didn't even bothered to search for them.

Check out turnkeyliniux.org. They offer prebuilt linux images of popular apps - including Gitlab:

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/gitlab

I keep a lot of personal/private data in git repos. I'd rather have this data on my own hardware or servers I admin, can audit, can apply unusual SSH security policy to, etc. gitolite and gitlab are great Github replacements for this purpose.

That said, I still use github (or bitbucket, etc.) when I want to share code - it's still the best place to do that.

I just don't need their private service, which appears to be the same case as the author.

If you don't use or like github features, you don't really need to pay for it. Sounds like common wisdom. OP listed points which do not define github. If you want unlimited private repos "in the cloud", just use bitbucket.

Github provides excellent interface and workflow patterns for code collaboration. I don't know, maybe for some it's reasonable to swap patches via mail, but for me hassle of downloading attachments from gmail into the right folder is just not worth it.

Also, laugh all you want, but rendered README.md and having all code at glance are life-savers. It's so much easier to get a hold of what another open source library does, if it has nicely formatted README with examples. Bonus points for gh-pages hosted docs.

Watch out with the sending email directly from an EC2 instance. You don't really have a fixed IP so rDNS isn't going to work very well, and that's still a front-line filter for a lot of big email providers.

If you are an Amazon EC2 user, you can get started with Amazon SES for free. You can send 2,000 messages for free each day when you call Amazon SES from an Amazon EC2 instance directly or through AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Many applications are able to operate entirely within this free tier limit.

http://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/

You could also use Mailgun, mandrillapp.com, etc. I believe they all provide at least 10-12K emails/month for free, by calling a RESTful web api.

Yeah, those are all great options. I know for sure Mandrill lets you send SMTP through them and I think Mailgun does too. It's just a matter of configuring your Postfix server to relay through them.

Yep, some RBLs block most/all of EC2's address space, it seems. Or used to, at least, and that probably hasn't changed.

I applaud the writer for his approach to making his own hub for his team. However, this is not a real 1-1 swap. In terms of pure functionality this may be an even exchange; his own platform might meet his needs just as well as GitHub. Yet it lacks major benefit - the community/public aspect of that environment. Duplicating that factor would take too much time an effort when you could just pay 7 bucks a month for the same thing.

Sometimes, while its fun to reinvent things, it just makes more sense to use what's there.

I pay because github is a fantastically useful tool. I am willing to pay for quality software. If I wasn't and other people like me weren't willing to pay for software, a lot of us wouldn't have jobs.

summary: paying a vps is cheaper and gives you more than git hub.

in my experience, pros: - full control (he is not using this as he and all other probably commit as user git) - commit hooks

contra: - you take the time to setup, debug, maintain. (track all those pesky security updates) - you have to backup. - people already have their keys setup at github.

also, about the paying for privacy... i have two github accounts. one with my real name another with a pseudonym.

and to conclude, after some time, i just moved all my code to bitbucket. initially because i rather mercurial and they have both. but then because you get a few private repos

> i have two github accounts. one with my real name another with a pseudonym.

Until relatively recently (at least that was the case about an year ago) having multiple GH accounts was a TOS violation. (And I needed a pseudonymous account, so that drove me off to BitBucket.) They seem to have changed that, so you're not allowed to have more than one free account per human.

Kind of OT: I have just opened a free github account to follow a project. Any tips for a painfully pathetic n00b for learning to use github generally?

If you understand Git well enough, then the only major difference Github adds is pull requests, which is a pretty intuitive concept once you understand Git branching.

Try http://git-scm.com/ for a great (official) tutorial.

I actually know nothing about Git. But thank you for replying. Will check the link. :-)

I'd saved this link of an interactive "Learn Git" training program: http://pcottle.github.io/learnGitBranching

How are you only paying $7? The lowest tier I can see is $25/month for 10 private repos.

How does using Amazon's services make you any less of a "product"?

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