jarek

I will keep my future HN posts strictly ideology free!

UK voted to sell itself out to rich people with mobile capital when they decided to stop being a manufacturing country and start being a finance country. That started in the 1980s and hasn't stopped since (witness Labour only ruling when they became "New Labour" stripping out all the too-Laboury bits). Plus it's hard to feel bad for people who reaped the benefits of colonizing half the world not too long ago.

Not to mention people in London usually complain about the wealthy Russians and Saudis these days

Yeah but it's hard to say it wasn't a waste of a beautiful location plopping down crap like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Royal_Centre_Vancouver.jp... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Scotia_Tower_Vancouver_20... and hectares of Specials in the 1970s ... and I actually like good brutalism, modernism, and international style, can't imagine what people who don't like them at all must think

Seems a great waste of a beautiful location.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. One might inquire what the First Nations think about white man's towers of glass and Vancouver Specials in what used to be beautiful temperate rainforest...

Depends if you like talking to people IRL

(Disclaimer: I usually don't)

Ah but I bet that the animations were beautiful and the icons all lined up perfectly

I make no assumptions, I only contrast A_fow's experience with that of the Coast Salish

For some reason I get the feeling that adopting all of these "smart" devices actually makes me more vulnerable to risk and gives me less control over my life.

Oh, of course it does. Consider: when are you more in control, when you know the city you're in inside-out, or when you're depending on Google Maps?

It feels like my home is being sold out from underneath me to the Chinese. ... But it makes me very sad to feel like I don't belong in the place where I grew up.

Don't worry. If how the English treated First Nations is any guide, you'll get a reservation at the end of the day.

(Really brief history for those from outside the region: ethnic-Europeans have been ruling British Columbia for less than two hundred years.)

There are a lot of ways to do that, and many of them involve the current team members being proactive about going out and trying to recruit someone to fill that role.

Orrrr the current team members can be proactive and do something that will reduce the number of bad bug reports they get.

Without Github Issues you might miss out on useful input such as https://github.com/kennethreitz/records/issues/10 though.

How many of the PMs you know have you contacted suggesting that they volunteer in such a capacity? What were their reactions?

How many have you suggested volunteer, and what were their thoughts after a semester?

No, I'm not actually suggesting that he should volunteer.

But saying "surely someone can just volunteer" is pointless in the absence of evidence that someone actually wants to volunteer. If anything the evidence points to not enough volunteer triage PMs - the OSS world is not short on projects that could use a triager.

Do any students/newbies actually want to triage issues, or is it just something the old hands thought up and think might work nicely?

Get someone to join the team who wants to fill in a PM role.

That sounds simple. You're volunteering, then?

I do not hear the "necessity is evil but we have to live with it". If people are not willing to prove their worth to the community and being scrutinized they should gracefully resign and admit they are not fit for the mission.

Great, so now they've all resigned and we're back to the start with no idea how to solve traffic congestion in a city with a bridge.

Best ask StackOverflow.

Trying to access the documents ... they are not public domain, open licensed, nor indexed.

You have a long day ahead of you if you want to rant about non-open licensed academic papers

This is completely untrue. You can't look for planning information the same way you look for code snippets. This is like looking for medical research on Youtube. StackOverflow? Try https://www.planning.org/ and the Journal of the American Planning Association.

As well, in any profession with large public impact, there is a gap between what the professionals know and what the public accepts. A planner can tell you how to solve traffic congestion in a city with a bridge, but it might not be so simple for a politician to convince people to pay millions, or worse, alter their lifestyle to make it happen.

To give an example: do you think economists and policy professionals don't have a lot of ideas to simplify and improve the tax code? Then why aren't they implemented? Because lobbying and special interests, because talk radio, because social equality, because families, because people think of themselves as impoverished millionaires, because messy real-life stuff.

You can log into an @gmail.com Hangouts account through XMPP. The instructions on https://wiki.bitlbee.org/HowtoGtalk worked for my account which is also accessed by Hangouts on Android L.

(At least person-to-person messaging works well - I have not attempted group chats or video or stuff)

Honestly, I agree, and I love having my house low-tech and simple. The best solution is avoiding the problem altogether.

But your argument can be advanced against electric light. I could do just fine with candles in my house. But in 2016 I'm not going to go back to candles, even if electricity isn't really saving me that much time or money.

Imagine in 2050 never having to turn on the lights again because they will turn on automatically and that will work well. Never deal with carrying things and reaching over with your elbow. It won't add more than $200 of value to your life, but will you actively opt out of it?

It's not that "IoT" will make your life vastly more efficient and save you tons of money. It's that when it's easy enough and good enough, it will become the new normal as mains electricity is now. Currently it's a buggy gadget, but so was every technology once.

Eh... there's some value, it's just really badly implemented currently.

A selling idea of the Nest is that it keeps your house warm when you're there, and not-frozen when you're not, and it will do so efficiently, so that the house is warm when you arrive home but not long before.

Now of course you can just turn up the heating as you walk in the door wait a few minutes to heat up, it won't hurt. But if technology can do it reliably, there's clearly some value. Compare, for instance, lighting a candle when you get home with just flicking the switch for those newfangled electric lights. The candle works but the technology is more convenient.

Of course, electricity doesn't give you failwhales these days, and there's a bit more engineering involved than "move fast and break things."

30-50 years of replacement time is apparently not sustainable, since most of the things we buy have 3-5 years of expected lifetime tops.

In practice, yes, most things we buy are designed to fail. But in principle 30 years is possible, if anyone is willing to pay for it. Lots of people aren't, for many reasons including time cost of money, fashion, or just not caring.

Most software has to be replaced after at most 10-15 years, either because of security issues or just because it's no longer supported by hardware.

Yes, so there's the answer for why the software upgrade treadmill exists: it's for software not important enough to run on dedicated separated hardware. Few people are upgrading CNC controllers or power plant controllers or aeroplane controllers because of security issues or because the hardware is no longer available.

Anyway, even on the consumer side the lifespans are rapidly lengthening. In the 1990s running current software on five-year-old computers or using a five-year-old OS would have been basically unheard of in the mainstream. Today a five-year-old computer is only a step behind current and Windows 7 has turned 6 years old and is still extremely widely used.

Eh... yes, but.

The "rot" is because the environment is changing (the hardware you're running it on, other software you need to interact with) or the software is being carelessly updated.

If you need to, software rot can be eliminated. It takes effort but it can be done.

To give an example: you can run a space station with software installed in the 1980s, but you probably can't run a space station with seals or pumps installed in the 1980s.

Well sure, but there's an ultimately sustainable business model if your product needs replacing in 30 or 50 years. (Leaving aside the things like marketing claims of a "30 year" or "lifetime" warranties from a company with a 10-year lifespan.) Capital needed for initial production is then the only issue. But there isn't such a model if the product never needs replacing again.

Arguably, many of the "slide" images aren't directly relevant to the content, they're just there because you're expected to have images in a tech conference talk.

Software is the perfect product - it doesn't wear out, it doesn't go bad, if you really need to you'll be able to use software you got in 1990 in 2090.

For the software creator, once you've sold someone your software, the only way to make more money is to sell it to someone else, or create and sell a new version. Eventually you run out of someone-elses to sell to and can make new versions or go out of business.

... or sell a support contract or a subscription model.

I don't like it from a user's point of view, but squaring my preferences as a user with preferences of business isn't easy.

I think my biggest takeaway from Japan was that it's stuck between two worlds -- one 20 years ahead, and one 20 years behind.

Sure but you can give examples of that for just about every country. The Britons will laugh at U.S.'s card payment infrastructure. The Koreans will laugh at metropolitan U.S.'s mobile broadband infrastructure.

It has been incredibly interesting reading through those threads. People are arguing two completely different arguments. tptacek is saying that the dude keeping AWS keys without disclosing this was bad and guy is lucky to not get a early morning wake-up call from men with guns. slewis, comex et al are saying that Facebook not locking down and later disabling AWS keys was bad and Facebook was lucky they didn't get sold on black market. Both sides are correct but it's informative who makes which arguments.

My point was to challenge open source cheerleaders to actually give a reason beyond their own gain for why a company should do this. Instead, we have blithe dismissals and narrowly constructed hypotheticals built on optimistic assumptions.

I'm sorry, but what? Your whole initial argument is a narrow hypothetical "they will see our secrets" with no theory of what those secrets might actually be - what exactly do you expect in return? I gave you an answer based on your formula, and a follow-up comment afterward. Can you expand what about my answer was built on optimistic assumptions, in a way that your initial theory was not?

There are no private APIs nor secret data structures in software that you've distributed to users. It can all be decompiled and sniffed. "Oh but the competitors will see my code" is basically FUD. How many times has YC told us it's all about the execution, not the technology?

I don't even understand what this comment is trying to say. If you use HTTP to communicate between services, and those services are not publicly accessible, the use of HTTP makes it no longer a private interface?

Yes - if you make a HTTP call from an app, it can be trivially sniffed. Sniffing HTTP is the first thing a third party trying to discover that undocumented API would do, and you don't need source code for that at all. (This is also why you must always sanitize data coming in from a user's device, even if it's from your own app.)

You can make the argument that there would be a time cost cleaning up the internal calls that will no longer work once the servers are turned off. Sure, but: 1) there are no secrets that would give competitors a new advantage, and 2) if you don't have that time, just chuck the code over the fence and see what happens - worst is that no one uses it, which will be the case with closed code anyway.

When Pa == 0, so like, most of the time.

It's an email app. It talks IMAP^H^H^H^Hto Gmail. It runs on iOS. How many secret, commercially important techniques do you really suppose it contains?