> it's a power-play to make people create accounts and stay logged in so they can track you better
Github doesn't even serve ads. What exactly are you worried about? Your throwaway email being primary key #78,000,000 and having your visited repositories stored in another table?
It's a change in direction, one by one these things change, one day, there are Ads, or your github repo search journey is being used to train the AI programmer to replace you in those very libraries and repos you develop expertise in.
There's no good to come of requiring people to log in for the consumer. Online Tracking is never good for the consumer.
Yes. Microsoft is already siphoning data everywhere they can, why should I give them more?
Most people have their real name and e-mail there because they use it to sign code in trusted repositories, so it's easy to combine these data with other sources.
Microsoft serves ads though. I haven't looked through the terms and conditions, but I'd be amazed if it wasn't permitted for GitHub to give whatever they can glean from your data to their corporate overlord.
> Affiliates: Personal Data may be shared with GitHub affiliates, including Microsoft, to facilitate customer service, marketing and advertising, order fulfillment, billing, technical support, and legal and compliance obligations. Our affiliates may only use the Personal Data in a manner consistent with this Privacy Statement.
I've never had any success creating a GitHub account with a throwaway email address.
The last time I tried, I'm pretty sure the email address was rejected right away, and the account couldn't be created.
Not being able to reasonably create an account there is certainly annoying when it comes to performing simple searches.
It has also prevented me from submitting new bug reports and adding information to existing bug reports for a number of open source projects over the years.
I'm always disappointed when I see an open source project using GitHub, because it makes contributing to that project more or less impossible.
I deleted my account and moved my stuff when Microsoft took it over, and never looked back. A project on Github is a project i will not interact with. People have very short memories.
First? Isn't the beta-amyloid cabal still blocking all Alzheimer's research unless the researchers find a way to even tangentially support that long disproven theory?
Karen Ashe and Sylvain Lesné at Minnesota published a fake paper that redirected billions of research into the trash bin. https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/faked-beta-amyloid... Amazingly both still have their jobs for life, both still publish, Ashe is still a member of the National Academy of Medicine, both are still getting grants.
This is a mischaracterization of the scope of the fraud. Lesné clearly committed fraud, but his work was not foundational. The fraud did not "redirect billions".
Yes it very much did lead to billions of wasted dollars and that's if you count us public funding alone. Tens of billions of you count non us and private funding.
The Nature paper has been cited in about 2300 scholarly articles—more than all but four other Alzheimer’s basic research reports published since 2006, according to the Web of Science database. Since then, annual NIH support for studies labeled “amyloid, oligomer, and Alzheimer’s” has risen from near zero to $287 million in 2021. Lesné and Ashe helped spark that explosion, experts say.
The paper provided an “important boost” to the amyloid and toxic oligomer hypotheses when they faced rising doubts, Südhof says. “Proponents loved it, because it seemed to be an independent validation of what they have been proposing for a long time.”
From your description, it sounds like a large complex ecosystem (of which Lesne and Ashe were important parts) redirected billions. I think it’s a bit overselling it to say that their results alone redirected billions
As unavoidable mentioned, there are viral theories.
In Science, from July, "Can infections cause Alzheimer’s? A small community of researchers is determined to find out. Following up tantalizing links between pathogens and brain disease, new projects search for causal evidence", https://www.science.org/content/article/can-infections-cause...
I mean, that's the point - in pharmaceutical sciences there's _so much noise_ including fraud that it's really only easy in hindsight to pick out "the guy" who was the "genius". It's hard to take one story like this and make it a repeatable success.
There's a nasal flu vaccine as well. Theoretically, it's supposed to induce immunity in mucous membranes and prevent infections in the first place, rather than merely reducing symptom severity. As for how effective it actually is at those goals, we'll have to see.
I so badly wish they'd open-source Windows. It wasn't bad enough that they refuse to fix obviously bad code, but they also don't allow the very many talented performance engineers submit PRs that would do in a month what they couldn't get done in years.
> I so badly wish they'd open-source Windows. It wasn't bad enough that they refuse to fix obviously bad code, but they also don't allow the very many talented performance engineers submit PRs that would do in a month what they couldn't get done in years.
Being open-source wouldn't fix things like that.
It'll be just like Gnome: PRs that fix UI gaffes wouldn't be accepted because "The Developers Know Better!"
Of course [1]! How would they give consistent, cleanly designed UI. I find the UX/UI much more cohesive than Windows' where some apps look like flat boxes (metro UI), others look like classic Windows.
You thought open-source means there'd be no design and they'd only jam code, while designing and architecturing is only for proprietary projects within ivy towered castles?
That's just wishful thinking, but I wish there was a way to license the NT kernel and other core OS components. That way, other companies could work to add usable and performant userspace components to their version of Windows, with users finally being relieved of dealing with the batshit crazy UI and other warts Microsoft keeps on adding.
The only ones that I've found are Windows "mods" that use a combination of NTLite[1] for feature removal and slipstreaming and some edits to icon resources in system32.dll etc.
Did you have something else in mind? Email is in my profile in case you have a link that you can share.
Depending on the kinds of games you play, Linux + Proton can provide an excellent gaming experience now, often times better than on Windows, with fewer stutters.
Some multiplayer games with kernel rootkit/anticheat might not work, but I haven't encountered any Linux-specific issues in the games I play. I'm sure this isn't the experience for everyone but it's worth a try.
What drives me nuts is that even though Windows is the only os I have paid for it's also the only os I use which doesn't include full disk encryption (unless I pay even more). Linux is free and comes with it. Macos is freeish and comes with it. Windows home costs over $100 and doesn't. Those built in ads are also ironic.
Grey market pro keys are like $5 on ebay. I have zero qualms buying them when such a basic and critical form of security is absent from the base edition. It’s malpractice.
Maybe they could consider an Apple-style approach: open source the core of the kernel and text-mode user space but leave the GUI closed.
Of course, open sourcing everything would be even better, but that might too big of a step for them. Open sourcing the non-GUI core could be a good initial step, whether or not it ends up going further.
my guess is if they did it it would be under some odd ball license just to make sure its code couldn't be incorporated into other penguin themed operating systems
Zoning restrictions in just three cities (San Francisco, San Jose, and New York) are responsible for all of the United States' GDP being lower by double-digit percentage.
It is in the interest of the entire country that these regions be forced to allow maximum housing development, because it will raise incomes across the entire country.
>Do the tax payers of SF not get a say in how their community is managed?
We know why zoning density restrictions exist, because their birth place was across the bay in Berkeley, whose proponents loudly extolled its benefits in pushing out anyone who was not White. This was the original intent of getting a say in development: to prevent undesirable racial minorities from moving in next door.
San Francisco weaponized housing density restrictions to push black people out of Haight-Ashbury, and to this day, continues to fight any and all housing development that might reverse this grave injustice.
If New York and the Bay Area alone relaxed their zoning, their GDP would be 33% higher, and US GDP would be 3.7% higher (as of 2009), and national average income would be $3,685 higher.
The government reaction to the 2021 economic circumstances was to counter the hot job market, not inflation. It is explicitly and legally the mandate of the federal reserve to target maximum employment first, and 3% inflation if possible.
Inflation has been normal for a while now by most metrics, but rates are still sky-high to crush worker power. This may not be the stated goal, but it is the actual outcome we can see.
The relevant section of the U.S. Code is 12 U.S.C. § 225a, which states:
"The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Open Market Committee shall maintain long run growth of the monetary and credit aggregates commensurate with the economy’s long run potential to increase production, so as to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates."
The reason rates are staying high is because of the expectations game. The US had unfathomable price stability for decades. The fed realizes that the inflation genie is out of the bottle. The only way to get it back in is to overcompensate by raising rates and leaving them high until people forget about 10% inflation.
I also think the antitrust suit (and many more) need to happen for more obvious things like buying out competitors. However, how does publishing a list of valid IPs for their web crawlers constitute anticompetitive behavior? Anyone can publish a similar list, and any company can choose to reference those lists.
Hmm, the robots.txt, IP blocking, and user agent blocking are all policies chosen by the web server hosting the data. If web admins choose to block Google competitors, I'm not sure that's on Google. Can you clarify?
A nice example is the recent reddit-google deal which gives google' crawler exclusive access to reddit's data. This just serves to give google a competitive advantage over other search engine.
Well yes, the Reddit-Google deal might be found to violate antitrust. Probably will, because it is so blatantly anticompetitive. But if a publication decides to give special access to search engines so they can enforce their paywall but still be findable by search, I don't think the regulators would worry about that, provided that there's a way for competing search engines to get the same access.
This is false, the deal cuts all other search engines off from accessing Reddit. Go to Bing and search for "news site:reddit.com" and filter results by date from the past week - 0 results.
It kind of is. If Google divested search and the new company provided utility style access to that data feed, I would agree with you. Webmasters allow a limited number of crawlers based on who had market share in a specific window of time, which serves to lock in the dominance of a small number of competitors.
It may not be the kind of explicit anticompetitive behavior we normally see, but it needs to be regulated on the same grounds.
Regardless of whether Google has broken the law, the arrangement is clearly anticompetitive. It is not dissimilar to owning the telephone or power wires 100 years ago. Building operators were not willing to install redundant connections for the same service for each operator, and webmasters are not willing to allow unlimited numbers of crawlers on their sites. If we continue to believe in competitive and robust markets, we can't allow a monopolistic corporation to act as a private regulator of a key service that powers the modern economy.
The law may need more time to catch up, but search indexing will eventually be made a utility.
It's clearly meant to starve out competitors. Why else would they want website operators to definitively "know" if it's a GoogleBot IP, other than so that they can differentiate it and treat it differently.
It's all the guise of feelgood stuff like "make sure it's google, and not some abusive scraper" language. But the end-result is pretty clear. Just because they have a parallel construction of a valid reason why they're doing something, doesn't mean they don't enjoy the convenient benefits it brings.
Is there any good reason for Microsoft to not open-source Windows? They are dangerously close to creating the Year of the Linux Desktop if they continue proving Wirth right.
His experiences are completely alien now and not reproducible today.
How is it possible to get any blue collar job at all without extensive training and certifications on your own time and with your own money in that very specific field?
How is it possible to not only be able to support your family on 3 working days per week, but to find a boss willing to hire you as a part time worker for what seems like a high wage?
How was he able to seemingly be unaffected by frequent job hopping and employment gaps that today seem to be as disadvantageous as having face tattoos?
My own grandfather told me stories of lying about knowing how to drive a tractor-trailer, and learning on the job. Now we have licensing, background checks, reference checks, and all manner of ladder-pulling that is leaving the younger generation without the same opportunities.
Another factor that is overlooked is the tradeoff between interest rates and employment. The Federal Reserve, by law, must target maximum employment first, and then 3% inflation second. It flagrantly disobeys this law with zero consequences. For the first time since the 70s or 90s, we had a job market that favored employees, and all levels of government treated it like a policy emergency to stop immediately. https://x.com/mucha_carlos/status/1791621965343560152
Many stories tell that one secret is "showing up". For many jobs, the boss has a long list of ideal requirements. Even a retail manager would loooooove to find someone with solid experience and recommendations (and is a buddy, jk, or am I?). Anyway. And then also keeps around people who simply reliably show up.
We're talking past each other. You're talking about retaining people already hired or simply rehiring people.
I'm talking about the ability to get a job in the first place. Employers are spoiled for choice since 2008, and their requirements genuinely are hard unless you happen to know someone. Your experience in tech is an outlier. Your experience outside of tech in your state and your city is vastly different from my state and my city.
> How is it possible to get any blue collar job at all without extensive training and certifications on your own time and with your own money in that very specific field?
People do. And sure you can find lots of fields as counter examples. I guess people do because they do not insist on these fields.
I was not talking of re-hiring. In the case of retail, you have store managers with lots of candidates who end up having to "hire" one after the other because they still can't fill their schedule with people who actually show up. They hire enough at random so that eventually they do have people who stick.
Parts of Los Angeles, specifically, now, specifically, are filled with entertainmnent industry hopeful for small part time industry jobs. Meanwhile they make do with day jobs that require no particular training or certification. Besides actually showing up, which is not to be taken for granted when many people will outright say it aloud "why should I care?"
The Ghost Ship in Oakland, SF Bay Area, an artist coop kind of thing until it burned to the ground was "charging about 25 resident artists rent ranging between $300 and $600 per month. The monthly rate for a one-bedroom apartment in Oakland at the time typically exceeded $2,000." They are not the only place like that in the Bay Area - they were cheap though.
I'm not talking tech jobs. But actually I do have examples as tech jobs also! Some startups are fairly desperate in their hiring - and may not pay all that much but certainly enough to survive. In one crazy example, they paid room and board, and not much more. And they worked out perfectly fine on that person's resume for their next job.
this is sadly true. as much as i "want" the old stories like OP to be true now (they may still be in rural areas i suspect), those times are basically over. i suppose one could do jobs like fruitpicking (totally unskilled) or other things like that but those employers dont want someone fluffing around for 3 days a week they want your life
> 8. All of local politics in the muni I live in takes place in a forum like this, on Facebook[.]
The electeds in our muni post on it; I've gotten two different local laws done by posting there (and I'm working on a bigger third); I met someone whose campaign I funded and helped run who is now a local elected. It is crazy to think you can HN-effortpost your way to changing the laws of the place you live in but I'm telling you right now that you can.
This is a magical experience. I've done something similar in my university's CS department when I pointed out how the learning experience in the first programming course varies too much depending upon who the professor is.
I've never experienced this anywhere else. American politicians at all levels don't appear to be the least bit responsive to the needs and issues of anyone but the wealthy and powerful.
Github doesn't even serve ads. What exactly are you worried about? Your throwaway email being primary key #78,000,000 and having your visited repositories stored in another table?