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.