otherusername2

It seems like most in this comment thread agree that this action, as a singular act, is a good thing

That's just because those of us who don't are afraid we'll get chewed out here, so we're not commenting.

Personally I think this is censorship because Github holds power in the development world. Basically every developer is on Github. I switched from Bitbucket to github not because Github is better, but because it's basically open source suicide NOT to be on Github.

Disabling a repo because they don't agree with a word in it seems like an abuse of that power to me.

So basically, I feel it's censorship because Github holds enough power over its users.

Looks reasonable as a support when your child is being taught how to swim (and is thus closely monitored). Looks absolutely horrible as a means of preventing your kid from drowning though.

disclaimer: I'm not in any way a professional when it comes to water safety, so this is just a remark; not advice.

Yes, that would be a waste of time. But in the past I've gotten in the habit of commenting things in the database for larger projects, and have written a bunch of tools to extract those comments and generate database documentation from it. For large databases (table-wise, not data-wise), it's been absolutely invaluable to be able to just take the DB docs and reason about how stuff works in there. "Oh, this table is fed by a trigger from table X!", "Ah, the `system` table contains non-tenant specific global system settings". Stuff like that.

Yeah, in a perfect world everything in a database would be obvious from its name, but this is not a perfect world and naming things properly is extremely hard.

Only if the send you your old password. If they reset your password, they can send you the plaintext first, then hash the password and store it in the database.

For me it's not so much that handing over cash is mentally more painful. It's just that cash is inconvenient to obtain, so if I don't have enough of it on me, I won't buy that drink in the shop when I'm only 20 minutes from home. With plastic, there's always enough money, so I don't even have to think about it.

I think we don't even realise the impact we can have on people, deliberate or otherwise. Years ago, when I finished highschool, this guy came up to me and said "thanks for acting normal to me, it really helped me through the last four years". I kinda knew he got bullied, but I never really realized how much it bothered him or how my interaction with him affected him. He was just this guy, and on occasion I'd talk to him if I saw him in the hallways.

Since then, I've always had the feeling that you don't really have to try hard to have a meaningful impact on other people's lives. Just be nice in general and you'll have more impact than you can imagine.

See my reply to jamongkad.

A little late, but anyway..

I've had panic attacks in two locations: while falling asleep in bed and in crowded trains.

I guess I just kinda got used to them. Since I know what's coming I don't feel the 'panic' part of the attack anymore. I just breathe slowly, deeply and deliberately, focus on my breathing. If I get the adrenaline rush you might be familiar with, I sometimes get up and walk a bit.

They key for me is to recognize when I'm having or starting to have one and not focusing on it too much. I don't know if it helped, but I used to meditate quite often. That tought me a lot about keeping my mind in check. This helps with many things, amongst which falling asleep (I just clear my mind and I'm gone in under 10 minutes) and panic attacks.

Airlines are like hard disk vendors or car manufacturers. Everybody has their anecdotal evidence that the particular one they hate is indeed the worst.

I once, involuntary, went without sleep for around 72 hours. I was at a music festival and we were either pulling through the night or I couldn't sleep because of the noise. When the time came to go home, I really felt pretty good. At that time I had been awake for around 60 hours. My body was tired and my thinking was a bit sluggish, but nothing too bad...

Until I got home and tried to sleep. By then I was feeling dead-tired, but I simply couldn't sleep. This wasn't your average "Oh I can't sleep, guess I'll do something else and try again later" case of 'insomnia'. I was so extremely tired; all I wanted was to sleep. I started having hallucinations much like the early stages of a mushroom trip (minus the fun). My eyes couldn't focus, I couldn't think.

Finally I managed to fall asleep (while constantly suppressing panic attacks; something I've suffered from in the past and know how to deal with now). I had lucid dream after lucid dream during that sleep. It was very unsettling as I got the feeling (during lucid dreaming) that I wasn't getting any "real" sleep and I'd go insane.

All in all the lucid dreaming aspect was pretty cool, and in retrospect perhaps worth the unsettling experience of being awake so long. But I'll never ever want to repeat that experience.

The whole shrugging off and downplaying of issues like this are exactly the reason the internet is complete shit when it comes to security.

Why, after all the exploits, insecure software and bad decisions, can people still not see that they can't anticipate everything?

For instance, here's a scenerio I can easily envision: The NSA strongarms Ebay into letting them sniff TCP connections to their favicon, combines the TCP fingerprint with the browser useragent to uniquely identify you from perhaps millions of other users. Geolocate your IP to determine where you are and bam they know all about you they need to know. Tin-foil hat? Of course. Plausible? Totally. Doable? Absolutely. They don't need to be perfect, just good enough.

Is there a XSS exploit in this? I just clicked on the 'alert' stream, and it displayed two alert dialogs.

the secret weapon of the powerless

It is. I've had a few managers where everything we all tried to change change were fruitless. The only solution was to either antagonize until things got out of hand, or to ignore.

I like to confront, discuss and get things improved

That's a good initial starting point. But I've also learned that there comes a time when expending any more of my own energy fighting such people is no longer worth it.

incompetent managers

In my cases, it wasn't incompetence but rather character. You can have rational discourse with incompetent people. You can show them why they're wrong. You can't have a reasonable discussion with someone who's own mind jumps from high-priority to high-priority, wanting everything yesteryear but isn't willing to put in the actual resources to get things done.

I've dealt with too many managers like that to expend much energy on it anymore. Mind you, ignoring them should be a last resort, but given enough experience with such managers, you learn to quickly know when you're dealing with one.

I'd much rather spend my time making customers happy.

managing by whatever is in front of the managers mind and declare it highest priority

Bane of my existence for the longest time. Eventually I learned to just ignore those managers. They're too chaotic to remember whatever I was supposed to work on for them anyway.

I've always felt that people didn't really regard Escher as an artist because his works are too straight forward. He manages to take his thoughts on infinity, beginning and end, dimensions and other philosophical and mathematical concepts and put them into drawings in a very clear way.

To me, this feels like incredible talent. But perhaps the artist world balks at such straight forwardness. Things need to be more abstract for them; more room for imagination about the work itself, rather than its subject.

Take his work "Hand with Reflecting Sphere". To most people it is a very well executed drawing, but not much more. But it is much more. The reflection in the sphere is infinite. It encompasses the entire room; the entire world even. A two-dimensional drawing of an entire room projected onto a tiny surface. Those properties recur in his "Circle Limit III" piece.

I'm not sure I would regard him as an artist. Perhaps he's more a philosopher that chose drawings to express his thoughts rather than writing. Regardless of which label we put on him, his works are fascinating to me in an almost Zen-like way.

This has nothing to do with stopping terrorists. I'm pretty sure Cameron is not a stupid person and has consulted with experts on the matter, and there's no way anybody with any kind of clue is going to think it's possible to stop terrorists from using strong crypto.

No, this sounds like playing the Terrorist wild card to ensure the common people don't get crypto. Cameron probably fears that your average (criminal) Joe, with the help of tech companies, transparently gets to use crypto. Crypto is getting to easy to use.

I did this too in the past, but I've since found the convenience of 'git gui' too hard to ignore. The fact that it seamlessly runs on remote servers over X forwarding without having to install anything on the remote server really helps.

I can't imagine my workflow being all that special, but I never have to deal with this?

I just write new features, refactor if needed, fix unrelated bugs, etc. When I feel like it's commit-time, I cherry-pick changed chunks or lines to commit into single coherent commits. If I've introduced a new feature that required refactoring, I'll first pick all the chunks that belong to the refactoring and commit; then I'll commit the new feature and afterwards commit any bugfixes and other side endeavors that may have come up during the development of the new feature.

This is one of the reasons I don't like working with Subversion anymore. Committing, say, two changed lines in a file with many changes is nearly impossible. In 'git gui' it's a simple as selecting the lines, right-click, "Stage lines for commit" and pressing the commit button, and I'm back to working on whatever it was I was really working on.

Dutch guy here.

I haven't biked in the U.S, but from what I've seen, biking in the Netherlands is completely different.

- Cars drive slower. 50 km/h in city zones, many places that are restricted to 30 km/h.

- Our entire infrastructure is adapted to biking. Separate bike lanes, bikes get their own stoplights. We don't need to cut through four lanes of traffic just to make a left turn. We're not part of the normal car traffic on bigger roads.

- Motorists are used to people on bikes. At the very least they don't hate them like they seem to do in the U.S.

- Bikes are often considered equal to or even higher priority than cars. That means bikes get the right of way just as cars do. In many cases cars have to yield to bikes (roundabouts, etc).

There's simply no comparison to be made between the U.S and the Netherlands when it comes to road conditions for bikes. Making any claim that "the Dutch don't wear helmets so I don't need to either" is ridiculous¹

Other than that, when I see U.S bikers in full gear on their bikes, I always have to laugh a little. Spendex shorts, special shoes, helmet, fancy racing bike. I've said this before on HN, but I think they take biking way too serious. And, but this is just a guess, I wouldn't be surprised if fancy bike makes you go a lot faster than the old dinky bikes we ride around on. And speed == danger, which is why your link points out that most Dutch people getting into accidents are wearing helmets: because they're doing recreational biking on fancy fast bikes.

I don't think I'd ride a bike in a major U.S city. If I would, I'd wear a helmet.

¹) If my perception of biking in U.S cities is even slightly correct.