jka
Joined 18 years ago
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Comment · 4 years ago
Quoting from a relevant wikipedia entry[1] to hopefully pre-emptively reduce some confusion:
'''
In parliamentary procedure, the verb to table has the opposite meaning in the United States to the rest of the world:
- In the United States, to "table" usually means to postpone or suspend consideration of a pending motion.
- In the rest of the English-speaking world, to "table" means to begin consideration (or reconsideration) of a proposal.
'''
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_(parliamentary_procedure...
Comment · 4 years ago
It's a shame that (if I remember correctly from the video?) the bug that allows this is restricted to single-player; if not, I suppose it'd be possible to start the "outer" map as a network game, and then use the second instance of the game to join the outer instance over the network (including the possibility to walk around and find the original player character).
Comment · 4 years ago
There can be a good intellectual challenge in refactoring code like that to be both efficient and readable (although at some extremes, and depending on the programming language, perhaps there'll be conflict between those two goals).
All the better if that refactoring is in a FOSS application/library to save other people the repeat effort (and potentially gather further improvements).
Your question reminded me of Raymond Hettinger's excellent 2015 PyCon talk about refactoring functional-but-messy Python code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf-BqAjZb8M
(as previously discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10023818)
Comment · 4 years ago
Per-employee distribution might tell one story; per-manager distribution might tell another.
Comment · 4 years ago
Offering an opinion: the tech industry is invested in the success of PyPI -- perhaps not always in a literal monetary sense, you're right, but certainly in an ecosystem sense.
Comment · 4 years ago
Ok: you've provided two requirements that I agree with:
- It should be possible to compare between two releases (I'd personally like to see a code diff, ideally with a complete path of the commits involved)
- Providing a reputation visibility mechanism (for publishers? author(s)?) across a series of releases is important
Those don't require user accounts necessarily, though. And responding to the end of your message: identity assurances, yep, those seem necessary; access management, I'm not so sure.
Comment · 4 years ago
Odd but serious question: could there be ways to distribute versioned software that doesn't require management of developer accounts (and the associated time-and-effort costs related to account takeovers)?
Comment · 4 years ago
That's a very good point regarding operational cost of handling account takeovers.
I'm not sure I have much useful commentary to add, but it does occur to me that a sufficiently-sized pool of software users could inspect changes (either at individual-commit-time and/or at tagged-release-time) regardless of whether each changeset is by the same author or in fact a different person every time.
Comment · 4 years ago
Choosing to use FOSS software to build products/services has always involved an element of caveat emptor, and even with the best of intentions, mistakes and errors are introduced sometimes, as they can be into any commercial software.
The technology industry (as the typical consumer of FOSS) generally understands that and introduces appropriate measures (dependency reviews, hiring developers with relevant experience, requesting professional security audits, keeping backups, ...).
Despite all those (sometimes expensive) measures, industry continues to develop (and indeed thrive) using FOSS, implying the trade-off is worthwhile. My guess is that it is in fact massively worthwhile, especially when comparing the technology economics of today with years and decades past.
Therefore I think it's reasonable to ask questions any time that barriers are raised -- however small -- on the production-side of FOSS. That's not where the bulk of the revenues are accruing.
(I also have a vague sense that 2FA could later be misused as an attempt to strongly-attribute blame, which again feels potentially unfair/unbalanced. if your business risk is high when upgrading packages, then you should review those updates more carefully and keep a record of the financial efforts and rewards)
Comment · 4 years ago
Trying to ignore any hype, lofty sci-fi ideas, or potential philosophical questions for a moment: roughly speaking, it sounds like this is a search engine, for use in a neat and thought-provoking use case.
There's an architecture diagram[1] alongside the source code, and my summary would be:
- The system has in-house web indexes built from Common Crawl[2] data
- The system receives snippets of text from Wikipedia and determines whether existing citations exist and whether they are valid
- If no valid citation exists, then the system performs queries against the indexes to find relevant URLs
It'd be interesting to learn how this approach fares compared to pasting the relevant paragraphs of text into search engines and excluding site:wikipedia.org from the results.
Something about feedback loops and data quality makes me wary that too much application of automated systems like this would lead to a degradation of content quality (each updated copy an imperfect translation or reference to an existing one).
[1] - https://github.com/facebookresearch/side/tree/a595fb09c85233...
[2] - https://commoncrawl.org/
This account's password has been randomized, so if you see it commenting/updating in future.. that probably wasn't me :)
So long, and thanks for all the fish!