h2s

From http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-tech/en...:

"Many geologists suspect that gas hydrates play an important role in stabilizing the seafloor. Drilling in these oceanic deposits could destabilize the seabed, causing vast swaths of sediment to slide for miles down the continental slope. Evidence suggests that such underwater landslides have occurred in the past, with devastating consequences. The movement of so much sediment would certainly trigger massive tsunamis similar to those seen in the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004."

Sounds dodgy to me :(

I'm planning to do exactly this, myself. Not so much because of any perceived danger to the open web posed by Google, but because I've come to realise that I simply have too many eggs in their basket. Tellingly, my list of products that I will be replacing is almost completely different to this person's. Google has become the Walmart of computing and it's time to resist.

I agree really strongly with 99% of this. I make a fairly niche command-line application, and I'm convinced that it would have exactly zero users if I didn't put as much time into documenting it as I do.

I think the GitHub stats make this point fairly well:

    Pushed 79 commits to h2s/ppl Apr 14 - Apr 20
    Pushed 34 commits to h2s/ppladdressbook.org Apr 14 - Apr 20

That's almost a documentation commit for every other commit to the application itself. It's a lot of work, but seriously, what's the fucking point otherwise?

I also agree about abandonware. I keep encountering this, and it's pretty tiresome. Somebody built some well-received little tool a year or five ago, and for a time they loved it. Now they're bored of it, and they make just enough of a token effort to sustain the project to temporarily fool you into using it. I even have a different project of my own that's starting to creep into this territory. Hopefully I will not make a hypocrite of myself when the time comes.

The only thing I don't agree with particularly is this.

    > Make sure the title starts with ANN or [ANN] to
    > indicate that it is an announcement, e.g.
    >    ANN Welle 1.5.0 is released

This seems an oddly specific recommendation to be making. We're doing Hungarian Notation for project blog post titles now?

Anyways, that minor thing aside, I think this is an absolutely excellent primer for anybody considering starting an open source project. If, while reading this, you find yourself thinking "How silly, ain't nobody got time fo' dat", then you're probably starting out your project with quite a low ceiling on its potential usefulness.

From the article:

    close port 80 on your API host

People use each other's employers to beat each other into submission. When that PyCon 2013 shitstorm went down, the Righteous Male Anger crew were very vocal about their plans to end all their business relationships with SendGrid in retaliation for Adria Richard's actions. It was a calculated move intended to get her fired for what she did. Presumably the dude who got canned for his remarks earlier in that sorry saga was the victim of similar pressure from her supporters.

Sometimes this happens because people force it to happen.

    > I've never had to do "maintenance", write CRUD apps,
    > had horrible bosses or worked with bad developers or
    > unpleasant people.

I wondered what you have been doing, so I checked your profile.

    > I spend my week days working on
    > Windows/WPF/C#/C++/machine vision applications for 
    > aiming lasers

Sounds pretty fucking cool!

My point was that Unicode is newer than ASCII, and that we can't hope to deal with Unicode (Ö) properly if we can't even cope with ASCII (') yet. Nothing to do with anglocentrism at all. I agree that there are lots of annoying computing problems for non-English speakers though.

While disappointing, it's perhaps not surprising that the umlaut in "Schrödinger's Cat" caused trouble. The fact that the apostrophe was ruled too risky as well, however, is an indictment on software engineering as a profession.

If people are scared to put basic punctuation marks in the names of things, out of fear that badly-written software might break as a result, then that is a sign of just how far we still have left to go.

That announcement should have clarified whether the communication they sent to Hetzner explicitly requested confidentiality. If not, the incident is as much Efnets's fuckup as Hetzner's. Why did it even need to contain such sensitive personal information about the sysop in the first place?

I respectfully disagree. If you don't treat test code with the same respect as production code, rot sets in. Rot in the test suite discourages programmers from trusting, augmenting and maintaining it, until it eventually stops being used altogether.

The most common type of rot in test code is caused by lazily copy/pasting vast blocks of setup code. The reason this is bad is that when subtle architectural changes break that setup process, somebody has to waste hours fixing 50 tests. Refactoring such code into a setUp method is the usual way of avoiding this.

    > PSR-1 and PSR-2 are controversial
    > Much of both standards are an amalgam of individual
    > practices produced via an internal survey of PHP-FIG
    > member projects.

Those member projects include codebases like Zend Framework, Symfony, Composer and Doctrine. Those standards are are a very accurate representation of the way the best, most popular open source PHP code is being written.

The only controversy I'm aware of is those petty pull requests opened by people who didn't like that they chose spaces over tabs, which eventually drove one of the founders of the group to quit out of frustration.

Sadly this is not complete protection. Many Linux distributions configure sudo to prompt for the password only once every 15 minutes or so. If you have successfully executed sudo in your terminal within the last 15 minutes, any malicious code that you run can silently escalate its privileges to root just by starting with "sudo -i;".

You need to have the following in /etc/sudoers in order to be truly protected by not being logged-in as root:

    Defaults timestamp_timeout=0

I'm a Vim user and this is the only Sublime feature that I think I'd like to see in a future version of core Vim. Another comment called it "syntactic sugar for macros"[1] and that's true. Multicursor functionality allows you to avoid repetition in so many cases that it's worthy of inclusion as a feature in its own right.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5504507

I've always been surprised that people bother installing Ubuntu on anything other than a personal laptop or desktop computer. Genuine question: what does Ubuntu offer as a server OS that isn't available in plain Debian?

I see. Now I feel bad for overreacting. In my defense, these pages look a lot more like receipts than purchase pages. I would normally expect a purchase page to have some visually emphasised call to action. I still genuinely feel a little guilty for contributing to any hysteria about this with my comment above though.

Do you have any links that go into detail on this? I was intrigued by your comment and I want to read more about it but ironically I couldn't find anything on Google!

Jesus H Christ, this is quite a fuck up. Over on /r/bitcoin there's a comment linking to a transaction involving 229BTC worth of "Avalance Spa Powder", which is one of those synthetic drugs of ambiguous legality. That's quite a violation of trust on Coinbase's part. Their reputation is nuked. (Edit: Please note that I am 100% wrong about this. Why don't I just shut the fuck up for once?).

Does anybody else feel that the current proliferation of P2P cryptocurrencies looks symptomatic of a pyramid scheme that has proven its viability (in the form of BTC) and is now being repeated by unscrupulous copycats who smell a quick buck?

I'm not calling the concept of BTC-style cryptocurrency a deliberate, malicious pyramid scheme in itself. I think this is an unintended side-effect.

There's a strong entrepreneurial spirit on HN and that's why a lot of people are telling you that "It's okay to make money".

Personally, I think it would cheapen the whole thing. Websites that contain nothing but affiliate links to "Products I might like" are already a thing: it's what all those millions of parked domains such as testing.com are.

    > Tasks
    > Consistent exercise of independent judgment and
    > discretion in matters of significance.

This one literally stipulates that you will be expected to think for yourself on a regular basis. Why on earth is this in there?

     > they thought for some reason they owned everything
     > I created, at any time, ever (sorry, no)

How common is this? I have yet to encounter it, but if I did I'd consider it an enormous red flag. It sends some very strong messages:

    - We lack the respect for you to even be subtle about
      leveraging the asymmetry of our power relationship in
      order to try to fuck you.
    - None of your potential future colleagues here are likely
      to be passionate about their craft, because people who enjoy
      making things of their own don't sign our contract.

I'm aware that employers are often willing to compromise about things like that during negotiations, but by that point the message has surely been sent.

For a time, I was working on gathering some good data on keyboard layouts. I wanted to work out which keys were commonly available, which weren't, and so on. I wanted to work out which characters were the most "i18n-friendly" for developers worldwide.

One day, I happened to take a programming class in Brazil. I noticed that a lot of students were simply switching their keyboard layout to US English in order to write code. I ditched that project.

You can always tell if something is garbage on here by looking at the average length of the comments. Almost every single comment on this link is an inane one-liner that adds nothing to any meaningful discussion. And lo and behold, it's the same sort of shitty discussion as on the bug report itself.

Compare this with the comments on the 21 Nested Callbacks link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5447287

    > They'll see untargeted ads, which will look like spam

That's your loss, not mine, asshole.

    > Eben Upton, one of the creators of the Raspberry Pi,
    > shared with us the brilliant insight that many young
    > people used to have to “choose not to program” when
    > they turned their computers on, in order to play games

What a quote. I remember this. My family had an Amstrad CPC 464, and when you booted it up, this is what it said:

     Amstrad 128k Microcomputer (v3)
     
     © 1985 Amstrad Computer Electronics plc
                and Locomotive Software Ltd.
     
     BASIC 1.1
     
     Ready

The very next thing that appeared was the text cursor, the assumption being that you would now begin to type code. You could choose not to program by putting a game cassette in the drive, holding Shift+Enter, and pressing play. But by default, you were programming.

I love that the Pi attempts to revive this for today's kids. At the moment I think the closest they come to anything resembling code is if they use Firefox or Chrome and accidentally stumble into the developer tools.

I wasn't talking about what Adria did. I agree with the consensus that she fucked up. I was talking about the fact that it's possible to be blinded by privilege and accidentally make remarks that really undermine the sense of belonging and safety of somebody with less privilege than you.

Just FYI: There are those of us reading this who understand your comments and agree wholeheartedly. The difficulty I think you're facing here in getting this point across is that people are angry right now. Angry mob mode is very much enabled, and it's a mode which reduces people's ability to empathise and change their minds.

Kudos for trying though.

My apologies, I remember in the original post you asked us to hold off on providing feedback unless the issues were present in recent Firefox versions. On the plus side, this motivated me to switch to Firefox Aurora just now and I must say, I'm extremely impressed!

The right-hand-side docking looks absolutely amazing (http://i.imgur.com/duQOXq7.png).

I have another bit of feedback. The web console has three positions available: Above, Below, and Window. With Firebug, I like to have the console open in another monitor and give the browser viewport maximum screen real estate in front of me. Firefox's web console doesn't let me do this because in "Window" mode it doesn't quite act the same as a fully-fledged window. For example, I can't maximise it and it doesn't have the full complement of normal controls in its window bar. http://i.imgur.com/V7eWC1m.png

If this is art, and "Art is Open Source", then I want to see some damn source code. Either that or something to reassure me that this isn't somebody co-opting positive terms like "art" and "open source" to add an air of legitimacy to what looks a lot like a very seedy act of passive mass blackmail.