HP is definitely cancer. Also humans.

Not sure if it's a pattern or coincidence, but this is the same woman who oversaw the implosion of Lucent (formerly Bell Labs). Two great centers of American innovation destroyed by the manegerial class?

Large corporations will always struggle to adapt to changing market conditions. Executives can't fix that, they can only make it worse (and they often do). The only universal truth revealed from stories like HP and Lucent is that corporations are supposed to die for the same reason people are.

If AT&T had gotten their way (as they surely would today), nobody would own a cell phone, and Unix would just be this weird electronic switching thing that CS departments warn their graduates about. Like the telecom version of MUMPS.

God ****ing damn it, if Google sold Piper it would drive Perforce out of business overnight, let alone open sourcing it, but here we all are, jerking off about Git because the worlds best dev tools company / ****tiest ad company is too lazy to hit a few buttons and I am really mad about it

Heh. A few months ago I had read about MUMPS on HN. At first it struck my curiosity as if it were some kind of hidden piece of treasure, an alternate approach to programming unhindered by dependence on the path of mainstream programming languages. Then... folks in the comments pointed out some of its horrors (like: only global vars, which, btw, must be within 6 chars and in ALL CAPS).

As for people or corporations dying... well, I won't try to say anything too deep here, but one notion coming to mind is that people die for very different reasons.

Like just recently, a video of Johnny Depp came out in which he suggested a really bad one (that is relevant to this thread).

Not sure about commercial offerings, but I've heard from several sources that Mercurial is basically a cleaner version of git, without all the obscure commands.

Then again, dying from a treatable illness just because the GOP wanted to save its billionaire Patreon subscribers a few bucks in taxes is also a really bad reason to die.

That would be a good ad campaign for the Dems, perhaps? A mock Patreon video from the GOP directed toward billionairs, charting all their progress in fulfilling their promises.

"We convinced millions of people that they are better off dead from untreated diabetes, than surrendering their freedoms. We would love to make further progress on other fonts, but we can't make it possible without the generous support of our loyal subscribers. God bless."

That's not the problem. I actually like the git workflow, and I even prefer the very unixy way commands are named and work (compared to hg which was designed to appease svn refugees). The problem is that git's internals are ****.

Git's design is fundamentally incompatible with large scale development.

Do you know what large businesses need? Atomic commits across many projects, fine-grained permissions, sparse x shallow clones, large binary file support, and file locking.

Do you know what git fans' answer to this is? "Your organization is wrong". You don't need atomic commits across many projects, or shared code across projects, you need to silo engineers into internal vendors, bisect be damned. You don't need fine-grained permissions, you need fine-grained repositories. You don't need file locking, you need to man the **** up and draw your pictures in a text editor so you can resolve merge conflicts like a true member of the master race. And large binary files? Pfft, who would ever need to store binary files inside a source code repository? Like driver microcode, for example? Definitely not the dude who invented the ****ing flagship SCM that can't handle them, no sir!

If you are a large company and you use git, you are basically a trendwhore moron, because it's easily the worst tool for the job. Even subversion is better. Even Mercurial, which is basically the same thing, is better for this - after Facebook spent years hacking on it, mind you, and they only chose hg for this because they thought Git was basically an unfixable disaster. Microsoft literally had to rewrite git as a filesystem driver in order to make it passable for the Windows team. And what a ****ing waste of time, too.

I'm about ][ far away from writing my own SCM because Perforce is basically the software company equivalent of contracting pancreatic cancer, and yet it's still better for you than ****ing git.

tl;dr: Google didn't write their own SCM for kicks. Well... just for kicks. I'm sure kicks were had.

Watching a video on Google Piper right now, about 11 minutes in, the speaker describes a Google service called "citc" (clients in the cloud), which sounds pretty much like they implemented the functionality of Plan 9 into their build system, where all of the operations you would have had to do in git actually happen in locally mounted directories of distributed objects. Which makes a lot of sense, since I believe Git is basically using a data structure similar to an old Plan 9 hash-based versioned filesystem (Venti), and also that Google stole a bunch of Plan 9 people from AT&T almost two decades ago.

So plan 9 isn't dead, you just have to work for the world's most evil ad company to use it.

Funny thing is, when Linus Torvalds went to give a talk many years ago about his new program he called Git, he asked the Googlers in the audience what they were using (it was Perforce), and responded by telling them that he felt sooooo sorry for anybody that had to use Perforce.

Meanwhile while Reuters is running this article about Russia asking for the same source code access the US government gets, actual American cyber weapons have fallen into the hands of actual criminals who are using it to attack civilians and businesses.

At what point do we draw the line between epic Russian cyber operations and their legitimate security concerns? Isn't it possible we're hyperventilating about Russia and just ignoring the larger concern that computer systems are poorly designed and vulnerable?

This just in: a year after Snowden reveals the extent of NSA spying and backdoor capabilities, a world power goes to further lengths to make sure their software doesn't have backdoors. Clearly this is the work of a hostile actor trying to steal secrets to wage further cyberwar against the United States.

I don't think "we're" hyperventilating about Russia, as much as "we're" complaining about the spinelessness of certain corporations, which accepted unacceptable terms for doing business, instead of doing what they should've done: forgo access to a lucrative market in order to not compromise US security.

Sure, Russia does have legitimate security concerns. But they're Russia's problem, not our problem. And, in fact, in some domains, Russian interests directly conflict with Americans security concerns, such that we're locked into a zero-sum game against them, such that to the extent that Russia is bolstered, the US is weakened. That's the "line": when Russian actions tip the scales in their favor against us, in this case, through the acquiescence of US corporations.

The solution is that US companies don't do business with Russia when it means violating US security interests, and Russia builds its own software that meets its security needs.

There's really no nuance or compromise to your views, is there?

I think I sound pretty reasonable.

Come at me brah!

This would be a totally reasonable perspective if we lived in an alternate universe where the US's national security problems were being caused by foreign antagonists and not the US itself and its allies.

god forbid companies allow enemies to pierce the veil of American national security by obscurity just so they can sell more product, sharing source code with powerful threats like Russia and the US federal government.

If I were Russia my main concern about the NSA backdooring my servers wouldn't be using those backdoors against me, it would be the NSA's repeatedly proven incompetence at keeping those backdoors secret.

I really wish Clinton was not an incompetent politician. With the talk of Trump privatizing national parks and increasing prospecting on government lands..

I think that would require the legislature, and I'm fairly sure that a good chunk GOP would really hate that.

I wish Democrats had a real primary in 2016.

I hope so. The more sensible wing of the GOP is the one thing standing between us and a bunch of bad legislation. Though it's looking like some form of Trumpcare will pass. Thankfully I'll be on a university healthcare plan, I would hate to be in a lower tax bracket uninsured right now.



Me too, if not for just the inspiration to voter confidence. My deep suspicion is that even with a completely unbiased primary, Clinton would have pulled through, the disparity in votes was that wide. But when Clinton, say, hires Debbie Wasserman Schulz after the Wikileaks fiasco, they effectively demoralized a good portion of their voter base.

Medi-cal recipients will continue to receive benefits from the state of California, since the state will very likely be footing the bill for the expansion of Medicaid when the federal government cuts off funding in 2020.

So on the one hand, you were never at risk at suffering from the damage of this, whereas the real damage is going to be the cutting of other state programs that may well affect all of us, which they'll have to cut from the state budget in order to sustain the Medi-Cal expansion.

OTOH, for anybody on the Obamacare subsidized plans: welcome to the private insurance market and have fun with your new premiums (or being uninsured should you choose to utilize your hard earned freedom to do so without IRS penalties).

I'm not going to be living in California in a few weeks. But that's nice to know, that if I come back it won't be so bad.

California is an example of several first world states that have enough economic development to sustain coverage and plan to do so.

OTOH, if the university you'll be working for is in a red state... then yeah, thank the maker for that university health plan.

Do you think Bernie supporters realize they were the reason a lot of people opposed Bernie?

Swing state. Virginia actually. I have no idea what their healthcare is like, but it's in the south, so it's probably not great.


I mean, that could also be since there was a media campaign to portray them as petulant children. Though I do think there probably was an abnormally large sect of dislikable supporters.

I'm not even talking about the media, though it absolutely did contribute. Every vocal Bernie supporter I encountered in person was so insufferable, talking about the man like he was Jesus. A lot of them were millenials who came from wealthy families. Many were retired stoners incapable of rationalizing a coherent argument for Bernie beyond "Hillary's a crook!". All of them were completely out of touch and had little idea of the struggles actually facing lower and middle class America.

Ah, yeah, that doesn't surprise me. People can get too enamored with a politician. To a point of fault. Many of his supporters got to that point.

Several of my more casual friendships ended because I said Bernie was a slightly different flavor of business as usual. Several other relationships (on either side) ended when I said that Trump and Hillary are indistinguishable on all truly important issues.

It's been great, I've filtered a bunch of annoying people out of my life. Oddly enough, the Berniebros responded with as much histrionics as the shillarys

"everybody is an ******* except me"

Everything here is anecdotal, but still, I'm surprised to hear that, because I had the exact opposite experience. Nearly everyone I know who's about my age wanted Bernie to win. Some of them are legitimate leftists, for whom Bernie was a representative of their longstanding views, so that for the first time felt as if they had a candidate who might been able to win. And others came to "feel the Bern" over the course of his campaign. I had respect for all of them; none of them were like the people you describe, who surely exist.

I felt like a square, a holdout for supporting HRC through the primaries. The few other HRC supporters I knew seemed to supporter her because she was going to win anyway.

I doubt that Bernie's "basket of deplorables" was any larger than Hillary Clinton's.

But I agree the media was totally unfair to Bernie. I once watched a live stream of a New York Times reporter walk around Washington Square Park in NYC asking Bernie supporters questions in the middle of a rally. The reporter's leading question was often "who's your favorite of Bernie's celebrity supporters?" It was clearly a veiled accusation that if you support Bernie, it must be because you're superficial and lack a deep understanding of politics. Nearly every person the reporter talked to had a surprisingly sophisticated response to the supporters questions, some even acknowledging her bias in real time. It demonstrated how completely misinformed the reporters' questions were.

If those people are really terminating friendships due to differences in political opinion and Spook isn't leaving anything out wrt how he's expressing his views to them, I think he deserves the benefit of the doubt.