rmsaksida

The creator of the GitHub issue said the binary contains a cryptocurrency miner.

It's easy to go overboard with them, but if video calls are the price for going remote, I'll gladly pay.

Exactly. But an OSS community is very different from Twitter or Instagram. People will migrate to another website if Microsoft screws this up. Even if they don't screw it up, a lot of people are already willing to move because they hold grudges or are against a company like Microsoft owning the space.

If a GitLab or Gitea-backed community surfaces managed by a foundation, GitHub will be vulnerable.

Right now there isn't much of a point in moving to GitLab.com because they could be acquired as well.

I agree. My point is that a large number of businesses are likely to sign up because the service has a large number of users.

I don't think it's that bad, but I don't like it either. My main gripe is the sidebar. I don't like the fact it hovers over content. I don't know what the icons mean, so I always have to expand it to use it. I'd rather have it fully expanded always and displayed alongside the content.

Another problem is that the project explorer is very bare bones. I can't filter by language, for example.

I'm not sure you understand how popular Whatsapp is outside the US. No one in my country has heard of Yelp (201 million population). Everyone uses Whatsapp daily. Whatsapp has 1.5 billion active users.

> the companies which use the service don't have enough revenue to contact their customers through dedicated channels. If you try to monetize this, then most companies just leave because those who could pay already have such channels to customers

I'm not sure that's true about the companies which use Whatsapp. They are not using Whatsapp because they can't afford anything else. They're using it because the clients use it. In a large part of the world, everyone uses Whatsapp for everything. Companies go out of their way to support clients via Whatsapp - they even pay for shady unofficial APIs implemented by third parties.

A company unable to afford "Whatsapp Business" probably doesn't need it anyway. They can just continue using regular Whatsapp. No need to force them to use the paid version.

Some of the use cases for Whatsapp Business:

- Customer service.

- Product listings.

- Orders and delivery.

- Knowledge base.

- Notifications (flight status, tickets, etc).

- Promotions.

A lot of these would be attractive for large companies.

> You can't complain "they're adding ads!" unless you have a credible solution for somehow bringing in billions of dollars otherwise, and the WhatsApp founders didn't

What about business features? Pretty much every business in my country advertises a Whatsapp number, from large companies to mom-and-pops. People contact them over Whatsapp to ask questions, make complaints, order stuff, everything. I can't believe Facebook is unable to monetize that.

It seems to me that Facebook is severely biased towards ads because they already have a platform and it's a market they obviously know well. That doesn't mean ads are the only way to make money.

I tried to create a Trello board just now and the default visibility setting is private. I assume that hasn't always been the case, otherwise people really went out of their way to make these boards public.

Privacy issues aside, it has a noticeable effect on battery life.

Some of the scripts loaded by Wired when you access this article:

> http://ads.rubiconproject.com/header/11644.js

"Rubicon Project, the digital advertising infrastructure company, is on a mission to automate buying and selling for the global online advertising industry"

> https://tags.bkrtx.com/js/bk-coretag.js

"BlueKai is a cloud-based big data platform that enables companies to personalize online, offline, and mobile marketing campaigns"

> https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js

"Google Analytics is a freemium web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic."

> http://b.scorecardresearch.com/beacon.js

"Through our global research efforts, ScorecardResearch collects data that assists companies around the world in providing products and services that better meet the needs of consumers"

And of course:

> http://platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js

"Instagram is a photo and video-sharing social networking service owned by Facebook, Inc"

> http://connect.facebook.net/en_GB/sdk.js

It's Facebook.

The Lumia 520 was a very popular phone in emerging markets for a while. It was cheap compared to Android phones, had good battery life, decent build quality, decent specs. I think Microsoft just wasn't interested in markets outside the US.

Same problem here. It would be nice if Cloudflare created an alias to 1.1.1.1, because I can't access it at all.

Edit: 1.0.0.1 also takes me to the router configuration screen. And there's no configuration setting for it. :(

This happens for a single reason, briefly explained in the article:

> Unlike in the U.S., it is illegal to pay men to donate their sperm here, so domestic stocks are low and information about Brazilian donors sparse. “It basically says ‘brown eyes, brown hair, likes hamburgers’ and what their zodiac sign is—that’s it,” said Alessandra Oliva, 31, of the information available on local donors.

In Brazil they make very little information available about the donor - not enough to reach any conclusions about race. People who go to fertility clinics in Brazil are usually wealthy, wealthy people in Brazil are usually white, and people generally want their children to be the same race as themselves. So those couples look for the closest country where they can get "certifiably white" sperm for accessible prices, which happens to be the US.

The article makes this look like black and mixed-race Brazilians are trying to whiten themselves because of racism which is completely incorrect.

It may not be popular in Hacker News but people still use Ruby for lots of different things. And even in the web development camp there's life outside Rails. Hanami has been getting a lot of traction lately.

Rails is still moving forward, though. I think it's the first major web framework (outside of the Node.js ecosystem) to offer official webpack support.

Puppy Linux is still around as well. http://puppylinux.org/

Many years ago, in my first programming job, I had to do an ugly hack to fix an issue in production that was preventing other people from doing their jobs. In the minutes before I made that decision, while I was contemplating the problem, my colleague (a senior) asked me with a very serious face: have you ever heard of the POG methodology?

"POG"? No... should I have?

He smiled and explained it to me - Programação Orientada a Gambiarra, or "Gambiarra Oriented Programming".

I do this with Anveo. Costs me U$0.50 per month. The Anveo UI and user experience is really bad, but it's a surprisingly powerful product. It offers a wide range of forwarding options, I never needed to set up multiple services.

Obscure Mumps trivia: in the 80s, it was fashionable for the Brazilian Judiciary to build systems in M. (I have no idea why). Many courthouses and tribunals in Brazil are backed by large Mumps-based systems, not just for courthouse stuff but also HR and other purposes.

I worked as a civil servant in such a tribunal. Mumps was the first programming language I used professionally - in 2009! I wrote M for a living for around a year. It's still being heavily used in the place I worked at. My colleagues, who were more senior than I by a few decades, had written hundreds of thousands (millions?) of LOC in Mumps and developed a rich ecosystem of internal tools and libraries for it. It was a bit scary to do maintenance work on code that was written in the 80s, but I could often look at the author's signature and find out he was sitting right beside me - still pumping out Mumps. :-)

I can't say I loved the language, but it has some interesting concepts and reading about it makes me feel nostalgic.

Something weird about Mumps that I didn't see others mentioning here is how common it is for M programmers to abbreviate commands. Every command in Mumps can be abbreviated; "w" for "write", "i" for "if"; "s" for "set" and so on. This causes code to be extremely terse, and hard to understand for a beginner. A very simple example:

> I ($G(^ATM(1000))+$G(^ATM(500))+$G(^ATM(100)))<=0 D

> . W #,!,"There is no money available in this Machine. Sorry for the inconvenience."

> . Q

It gets way more complicated than that. After reading this kind of code for a few months, you get really good at parsing it.

I was close to forgiving them, but I'm holding onto my grudge because of forced automatic updates.

> Sure, we can blame carriers, manufacturers and hardware suppliers for having their own policies, but this is the same for your average Windows laptop minus the carriers. Bundled themes and crapware from Sony, Lenovo or Dell never stopped Windows from updating.

Sometimes they do. Samsung was caught adding bloatware that disabled Windows Update: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/samsun...

Oh, that's better then. In documentation they always point you towards using complicated mechanisms for communication, but I suppose that only applies to services running in different processes. Thank you for the clarification.

Could you elaborate on the marketplace backing Instapainting? You've mentioned sellers and painters - if I understood correctly, does that mean Instapainting immediately delegates to 3rd party sellers once a sale is done through the website, and it's the sellers who handle hiring the painters, shipping and (some of) customer service? If so, that's amazing and quite surprising. It really is a marketplace/bidding portal wholly abstracted for the end user.

Congrats on the website and success, very inspiring story!

> I can't blame the visitors, because they were here for a cheap holiday and knew no better.

It's fair to blame them, though. We all know Airbnbs are rented out by real people in residential buildings, with real neighbors. It's basic etiquette to treat the apartment as if it were your own and respect the people around you, no matter how much you're paying for it (and Airbnbs aren't always that much cheaper than hotels). I've stayed at a few Airbnbs and that has always been my #1 concern.

Guests being assholes is an issue that's certainly hard to deal with, but it doesn't sound impossibly hard. Maybe if Airbnb had a program to approach the representatives for each building an Airbnb is rented out at, giving them a way to be informed about guests and leave feedback for them... perhaps include some form of shared compensation with the host, at a smaller %. I can see buildings being pro-Airbnb if there's a fair system behind it.

> Explain to someone in the language you claim to be fluent in how you'd go about making a fire without any matches. (hint: you need to use words like tinder, kindling, flint, etc.)

I wouldn't be able to do this in my own native language (aside from "stone" and "stick", I'm clueless about the tools involved), let alone in a foreign one. I think this is way too specific to be a good test for fluency.

This looks like absolutely the best approach, but there's one thing I don't like about it: communication between IntentServices and the UI thread feels so... wasteful. The sanest way to do it, I think, is keep communication to a minimum, relying solely on the local DB as a source of information. But then every operation you do to fetch remote data immediately results in at least a couple of DB operations (store it, read it) and a ton of serialization. As far as I know, there's no simple way to pass an object from the service to the UI.

I've had some terrible experiences with Xamarin. The tooling is very rudimentary compared to Android Studio, performance is subpar, app size is huge, and development is so slow it's maddening. I wouldn't recommend it other than for some very specific use cases. I'd much rather deal with just plain old Android issues than wrapped-by-Xamarin Android issues and Xamarin-specific issues.

Keyboard shortcut tip for anyone who uses search a lot: Ctrl+K. Focuses the search bar on Firefox, and focuses the address bar and replaces it with "?" on Chrome.

I was a bit disappointed by this because it feels more like people trying to get press and make a name for themselves than an actual serious endeavor at digging through open government data with ML. The first thing you see in the README is links to numerous social media profiles, followed by a Kickstarter link and a BTC address. Zero technical info. Looking into the Kickstarter (well, Catarse, the Brazilian copycat), apparently there's a young company behind this - "Data Science Brigade". So I guess this is partly a publicity stunt.

I'm sorry, but if you guys are serious about building this open you should make it entirely technical and keep any press/social media/financial bullshit out of it. Entirely separated. In addition, if the project is sponsored by a company, make that clear in a notice somewhere. It just doesn't feel honest to do it any other way. I'm not going to contribute with time or money to a project that claims to be about "fighting corruption" but might have all sorts of unknown interests behind it. I'd be pleased to contribute otherwise.

I'm puzzled by this as well.