prajjwal

Don't get me wrong - I love IRC, and have used it as my primary social network for years. And after spending a full decade trying to switch people over to open protocols, I've found the hard way that the network effect trumps all.

I just don't see the average Whatsapp user ever switching to IRC.

- You cannot sign up for Telegram without your phone number (even if it isn't public). - End to End encryption exists but is limited to 1-1 chats. - Telegram cooperates with data requests from law enforcements.

The kind of risk this puts them in cannot be overstated.

I also can't see how its changing, I've become rather cynical from having to deal with it constantly. I sure hope you're right, though.

I put up with Firefox's single threaded nonsense for years, with their outright refusal to properly implement hardware acceleration for Linux, and with their clearly inferior performance. And now I find out they've got Google Analytics on a page where uBlock Origin can't even block it (at least not post FF 56), and that doesn't even respect my telemetry settings (which I've obviously disabled). Every decision they've made lately seems to be targeted at gaining the attention of people who clearly couldn't be arsed to get off Chrome if they proved it gives you cancer, instead of making it better for people who are keeping it afloat.

Congratulations, Mozilla. You've put a whole bunch of us out on the lookout for a replacement. Enjoy your descent into obscurity.

While this is nothing new, more sites like these are always welcome. If you plan on keeping this alive long term, please consider making an API so I can use it from the command line. Also, these services tend to get misused a lot, so you might want to log everything. Maybe encourage people to encrypt before uploading, too.

Take a look at a few existing services as well, to figure out what else you can add.

[1] https://file.io [2] https://transfer.sh

Just got done writing a script for the latter - https://gist.github.com/Prajjwal/63f5df1176ea05ee3679c04e0fa....

It's not about learning algorithms. If you do the Stanford MOOC on algorithms on Coursera, which is one of the best MOOCs I've ever come across, you'll find that the instructor emphasizes understanding over rote learning and implementation details. If you understand what data structures and algorithms fit where, you can look them up and apply them as and when you need to. Memorizing every nook and cranny of CLRS so you can reproduce it quickly in an interview is a terrible waste of time, imho.

I wish more companies would hire based on code that you've written, than a bunch of contrived puzzles you're supposed to know by heart so you can solve it on a whiteboard without blinking. But, since that's how the fucking system works, I'm forced to spend time committing these things to memory than writing actual code.

James Hague said it best, "Organizational Skills beat Algorithmic Wizardry". http://prog21.dadgum.com/177.html

I'm curious as to why they went with ONLY native Android / iOS apps. That will not only drive away people like me, who prefer to use things from a desktop web browser, but also people in developing countries who might not have access to a smartphone. That sounds like straying away from "I want to help connect people" to something more like "I want to help connect people who own an Android / iOS device".

As as aside, how many startups in Silicon Valley are rushing to up their spam game in the wake of this? :)

When it goes down, it goes down for multiple days, even a week. Prolonged outages have happened twice or thrice in the last two years, with no helpful messages from the staff. Heck, they didn't even bother announcing the outage before I posted on their community forums.

Their server stopped pushing offline messages to clients a long time ago. People complained, it still doesn't work on my end.

They said they would look into creating a status page, but we still can't tell during an outage if they know about it or not.

The bottom line is that maintaining their XMPP server is simply not a priority for them.

You should look into other providers that use better servers, and are also interested in maintaining their node.

EDIT: I'm basically asking you people to recommend a better XMPP node, somewhere you've personally had a good experience over a long period of time.

This has happened with so many services over the years, that one would think developers would be more enthusiastic about educating the end user with libre software. I do that aggressively with people I know. Too much to ask?

The opening line of this post is amusing. They ought to give thought to fixing their core product first.

This is an extremely useful service, btw. I can see myself using this a lot. Kudos.

RIP man, your work touched lives.

~ Ned Stark, A Game of Thrones.

I think that pathetic blog post where they tried to justify their actions made one thing clear - SourceForge knows how dead they are. No amount of internet outrage is going to help, they don't think they've got anything to lose at this point.

The best thing to do at this point would be to speed up their demise. If you're a developer that still hosts with them, delete your project and move to Github or Bitbucket.

Also, start reporting these malicious pages to Google so they don't show up in search results. https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_badware/

An RSS feed would be great.

Also, does anyone know what colorscheme this is using for the code samples? Looks nice.

Edit: I agree that someone who thinks the world being created in six days is just as plausible as theoretical astrophysics shouldn't be doing science columns, but a quick glance at her history shows that she's more of a tech writer.