gustavo_duarte

This is an interesting argument, and it's hard to say anything without data, which would be hard to measure imo.

As a counter, my intuition is that masks also remind people of the risks and actually encourage safe behavior. I feel this in myself, a greater awareness of the pandemic, a nudge towards being more careful. Extending your analogy, it's as if the seatbelt reminded people that there are some pretty grisly accidents out there, and maybe they should take it easy.

Both effects probably exist, not sure what wins out, and how much it matters.

Hi brw,

Your code remains living in its original repo. To keep things easy, it'll support only GitHub repos at first, then any Git repo, then potentially other source control software.

Here's what Shapiro says:

"The word "hacker" in its well-known computing sense has a first citation of 1971 (contributed by me) in the Historical Dictionary of American Slang. Here is an earlier citation, not precisely in a computing context but obviously the same term"

I interpret that as the only condition on the citation being "the well-known computing sense." He's definitely not saying "with negative connotations."

Even the phreaking stuff from the Tech is "not precisely in a computing context". I don't think the TMRC citation qualifies here, it's a very specific and different context (check some of its sibling entries), even if it shares some of that early magical MIT spirit.

But even then, the TMRC does also say:

"HACK: 1) something done without constructive end"

So, all in all, even taking the TMRC into account I think the origin of the word was already ambiguous, which it is. I think the small dash of mischievousness adds to the flavor of hacking.

Further down the article there are other examples:

  The “sources of material” included many people the
  Nazis sentenced to death for minor crimes, such as
  looting, and many convicted for political crimes that 
  particularly incensed the regime, ranging from treason to 
  the vague offense of “defeatism.”

As an example of this, Elfriede Scholz was sentenced to death for “undermining morale” in 1943 for saying she thought the war was lost.

I agree completely on the GH slow down / fail whale type of problems.

I use GH for about 12 hours a day almost every day, between open source and client projects. I face slow downs in the issue tracker, the git repos themselves (I only use command line), and the web interface to browse a project (code, history, pull requests). I notice a slow down about once a day. Some features, like the contributors graph, are always dead slow. About 10-20% of PR merge attempts fail, and I have to click the button again, sometimes multiple times. I see the Unicorn fail page or some Octocat fail page often enough.

It makes me think exactly of what you describe, a combination of Rails perf / scalability and perhaps a lack of strong backend engineering, I'm not sure.

Right now the problems are in the level of a mild annoyance / surprise that a company like GH has these issues. If it gets worse, I would consider moving away. But because I truly love the UI and overall functionality, it's a positive tradeoff for us at the moment.

You're very welcome regarding the YouTrack suggestion.

I understand the frustration with GH limitations (no burn charts and hardly any reporting). For us, the minimalism ended up working in harmony with our process, but I can see situations where it wouldn't.

The UI and milestones, though, I think are good. JIRA is to me the king of clunky. I've used it in 3 projects over the years and evaluated it last year, and I've been pretty disappointed with it.

To borrow from another comment here, it has a bit of a Bugzilla feel, like it just grew and grew, and you have tons of fields and features, but they're poorly designed and put together. A bit of a mess, to put it bluntly. FogBugz has a similar feel to me.

I encourage you to check out JetBrains' YouTrack. I never used it in a project, but a couple days evaluating gave me a good impression. Good luck with your search.

Agreed, email is clunky.

Have you used the GitHub mobile apps though? I find it's a decent way to keep tabs on issues, add comments, etc., when one is away from a bigger computer. I see that as a big plus for GH.