chrismonsanto

> Yes, you can. It's called contributing to a project. If the "half million lines of diffs" were actually things needing fixing, then the upstream team would accept them. If they are not necessary changes (such as ripping out all windows compatibility), then no, they would reject such changes.

I take it you've never dealt with an inactive/apathetic upstream before? Just because someone is the steward of a project does not mean they should be. This is perhaps one of the most valid reasons to fork!

The LibreSSL team says that there were big problems on the tracker that languished for years, such as OpenSSL not working correctly when you disable their custom memory allocator. If the OpenSSL team can't deal with bug reports in a timely fashion, what makes you think they will bother reviewing and merging hundreds of thousands of lines of code?

By default, no. Word splitting only happens when you request it: ${=words}. It reminds me of ,@list in Lisp, which is a warm and fuzzy feeling.

I always recommend people use zsh for scripting instead of bash--it gets word splitting right. Most of my sysadminny scripts start with #!/bin/zsh these days. It would be really nice if Linux distros came with zsh installed automatically!

For some reason the shell quoting behavior never seems to get brought up when comparing zsh and bash. It is, IMO, the most important distinction between the two shells.

I absolutely loathe fixed headers, but I think this script is pretty cool. The headers stay out of your way when you are reading, and when you actually want to use the navigation you don't have to scroll all the way to the top. I really see no downside, except "more JavaScript." (People who are complaining about JavaScript: you really aren't going to like the Web in 5 years)

I'm using Python 3.4. All the libraries I need are available, including the world's best database library, SQLAlchemy. It's a more pleasant experience than Python 2.x. And I have the peace of mind knowing that I'm not stuck on a legacy, deprecated platform.

I used to stick up for Python 3 on HN and other places but I've given up. I have no interest in converting people going to Go. And no matter what Python (or any other language) does, they are going to lose users to JavaScript.

Also, my experience is that people who feel passionate about Python 2.x will shout down people who are using Python 3 with "nobody uses Python 3." Who has time for that?

> If a modern democracy manages to have 80% voter turnout you will be surprise how many safe seats will be not so safe.

Are you suggesting that "people who decide to vote" is not a representative sample of the whole population? I am not sure of that, and a quick Google search shows mixed results.

> So just vote - no matter where you live. It is your civil duty.

I feel no loyalty to my country. I don't give a crap about civil duty. Most people I interact with feel the same way.

I've never heard this complaint before. I would have never guessed it would be a problem. Anyway, for the clone, you could just use a different command (such as rsync) to download the other Git repository to your HD, and use git clone on the local path. There is little difference since git clone grabs everything.

Subsequent pulls can be done directly to the remote repository.

> That said, has there ever really been an issue with speed as it pertains to markdown translation?

Yes, speed of translation is a big deal. I tried at least 4 Markdown parsers for Python precisely because I needed the right combination of speed and extensibility. When you are constructing a very large static site, a full rebuild can take a long time.

For those wondering, I went with Mistune (http://mistune.readthedocs.org/en/latest/). It is accelerated by Cython.

Is this title taking a shot at Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In? If so, I'm not sure what the connection between the two is. Anyone care to explain/correct me?

I loved Season 2. Season 5 was shorter and felt rushed compared to the other seasons. Still incredible though.

You'd think regulations would prohibit nonsense like that.

It's very difficult to write an OS that runs on the bare metal of an arbitrary computer. One advantage of virtualization is that hardware differences are normalized, and you only have to write a few drivers.

If I was to write an OS for fun I would probably target something with fixed hardware like the RPi.

>Edit: Anyone able to inform me how "FYI" could be offensive?

You are being trolled.

I think "retarded" is what is being referred to. It doesn't make any sense to call the terminally-gullible "gay".

I'm fairly certain I have a finite Erdos number, but it sure is a pain to find it. Someone with more free time than I should make a list of famous contemporary computer scientists by research area and their Erdos number! It would be a lot of help.

EDIT: it seems my computational geometry professor, Bernard Chazelle, has an E-B number of 5. Too bad I do not have any papers authored with him.

I think it's worth making a distinction between the Git plumbing and the Git porcelain when talking about performance. The core functionality (the plumbing) is very fast regardless of repository size. The slowdowns people describe are almost always related to the porcelain commands, which are poorly optimized. Almost every porcelain-level command will cause Git to lstat() every file in your tree, as well as check for the presence of .gitignore files in all of the directories. It's very wasteful.

The fix for this is pretty simple: use filesystem watch hooks like inotify to update an lstat cache. I wrote something like this for an internal project and the speed difference was night and day. I remember reading that there had been progress on the inotify front on the git dev mailing list a few years ago, don't know what the current status is.

I didn't downvote you, but this is a hot-button issue right now. A lot of people are familiar with what happened, and (perhaps wrongly) assume that everyone else is as well. Assuming that context, your post can be interpreted as "I don't think that the things said Horvath brought up were a big deal", where you might have meant "I'm not familiar with this subject, what did she bring up that was so bad?"

> She might honestly believe she was treated in a specific way because of her sex

Yes, but the investigation said there was no evidence for a hostile work environment. That's a claim above and beyond sexism: it's quantifying over all of the various ways a work environment could be hostile (of which sexism is one way). If what Horvath says about Preston's wife is true, then that sounds like a hostile work environment to me, regardless of whether the treatment was due to her sex.

> The investigation found no evidence to support the claims [...] of a sexist or hostile work environment.

So, are they saying that Horvath was lying? I mean, there was a lot of specific stuff she mentioned that seemed inappropriate. I don't want to get into whether the behavior was "sexist" or not, but I think we can all agree that if what she said was true, the work environment was hostile and unprofessional.

> however, it seems like many of the new popular options (cake, grunt, etc.) don't do what, to me, is Make's real purpose: resolve dependencies and only rebuild what's necessary.

You might like tup[1]. Its killer feature is that it automatically determines file-based dependencies by tracking reads and writes (using a FUSE filesystem). It has an extreme emphasis on correct, repeatable builds, and is very fast. Other stuff:

- does work in parallel, and will let you know if your build isn't parallel safe. (note it is NOT relying on your specification of dependencies: even if you manually specify dependencies, it will tell you if something's wrong based on what it actually observes your dependencies to be)

- tracks changes to the build script and reruns if the commands change.

- cleans up old output files automatically if build rules are removed.

- lets you maintain multiple build variants (say for different architectures, configurations, etc)

- autogenerates .gitignore files for your build output

- very easy to get started, and "Just Works".

- for advanced usage, it is scriptable in Lua.

I've tried every build system out there. For Unix-y file-based build tasks, tup is, by far, the best. I don't know why it isn't more well known.

[1]: http://gittup.org/tup/index.html

cat-v.org is a fun site. I had no idea the author passed on. Thanks for letting us know.

He quit Mozilla completely. I am guessing he is sick of all of the pressure. If he came back, there would be an unprecedented shitstorm, probably the exact opposite of what he wants.

I run a large community. Here are my opinions:

1) The easiest thing you can do is have a friendly reminder about what is and what is not acceptable to post right next to the comment textbox. When I was in grad school they used to remind students of the honor code before each and every test, and apparently it reduced problematic behavior.

2) Posters in heated conversations care more about advancing their view than keeping HN civil. You can't rely on the downvote system, because mean comments that advance the "right" view will be upvoted regardless. You can't call them out, because your thread will be one of many, and the damage is already done by the time the comment is read.

They simply need to be deleted, and I don't see much deletion on HN.

3) there is a 99.9% chance a post is spam if it broadly criticizes the behavior of HN as opposed to the person they are replying to. These posts should also be removed.

4) For every topic of political contention, there is a group of people that ONLY post about that topic. These people should be monitored closely. I don't consider these posters to be participating in good faith--this is (or should be) a community of tech people that occasionally talks politics. So if you only post about a particular political issue, and never about any technology-related topics, one wonders if you are there just to advance your political viewpoint. As an aside, these posters mostly come out of the woodwork for gender-related topics, which I think are consistently the worst category on HN in terms of comment quality.

5) we need a clearer idea of what is and what is not acceptable on HN. Honestly I want to flag most of the political stories. I hate them. But I don't, because I am afraid of losing the feature.

6) ignore people who whine about censorship. There are a ton of other forums they can post on.

7) a more radical idea that I am less sure about: remove all political stories, and make politics.ycombinator.com. The twist: make membership invite-only. If someone is uncivil then it reflects poorly on the person who invited them. This is, as far as I can tell, the only effective solution to stopping uncivil discourse. When tensions are high, any amount of incivility can trigger another user. The only way to stop this problem generally is to stop it completely, there is no half way.

EDIT: to be completely clear: this advice really only applies to topics where the posters on each side have what can only be described as religious devotion to their point of view. Civil discussion requires humility, and there is rarely humility in political discussions.

That's very elitist. Academic philosophers do not 'own' philosophy. What is the harm of us ordinary folk discussing it? (Also, if anything is inappropriate for HN, it's snarky one-liners. Please don't do that.)

I really think this is something people have to try for themselves. Also, people should travel more. Japan is such an amazing place.

Using an American toilet in 2014 is like programming your next web app in classic ASP. Time to upgrade.

> I find the moral compass of a lot of HN posters rather baffling sometimes.

From what I can tell, pretty much everyone in this topic thinks that opposing gay marriage is immoral and donating money to Prop 8 is a bad thing. The divide is on whether it is OK to oust someone for their beliefs, given a lot of extenuating circumstances. And on HN, there are a large number of people who think yes, and a large number of people who think no.

You know what bothers me? People who try to shut down debate. Those that think not only is the other side wrong, but it's not even up for discussion. There's another poster decrying the lack of ethics in the tech community, which really is another way of saying "don't even talk about this, my opinion is right/ethical/moral, and yours is wrong/unethical/immoral."

Another way of shutting down debate is by making snarky one-liners. Why actually talk about something when you can assert that you are right, and that HN is stupid (presumably excluding the large number of people who agree with you)? What exactly are you adding to the discussion?

> We can’t let that happen here: the open internet is not more important than gay rights or any number of other progressive causes, but it should and must be a broader movement. The moment we let “open internet” become synonymous with progressive causes—inside or outside Mozilla—its many conservative supporters will be forced into an impossible position.

This is such an important point. Please, let us not put all our eggs in one basket.

From Eich's position, and assuming he wanted to lead Mozilla, and assuming Mozilla wanted above all else for Eich to lead Mozilla, yes. Lying would have been the best move.

In a greater societal context, I'm not sure. I think it is naive to say being 100% honest and transparent 100% of the time is always the best solution, as theoretically appealing as that is. I think it depends on whether you personally think the greater good Mozilla could have done with Eich as CEO, if any, outweighs the (positive?) message that we send when we force people with unpopular beliefs out of their positions. I purposefully ignore the actual monetary contribution, since the Supreme Court struck down Prop 8 anyway.

My #1 question -- is Eich returning to CTO, another position, or quitting altogether?

All in all, I think this was a pragmatic move. I am not a fan of this "CEO = literally the company" logic, though. I saw no reason to believe that he would use Mozilla to further an anti-gay agenda.

I was really hoping that they would support Python 3. Unfortunately, Python 2.7 only.

Please. Python 3 is ready. :(