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>But at that price point, there are similar solutions available with much more coverage and features.

Exactly. I sit on a quarter-million dollar budget for hardware and services, but I still have a value-for-money filter, and this doesn't pass it. I might as well use this:

https://github.com/grahambell/crab

for free, or pay for a monitoring solution that is higher reliability, is inside my network, and doesn't charge me per cronjob. Even at the bulk plan, half a cent for a single cron job to send a single daily http request and only alert the one guy who has an iPhone seems... unreasonable. It doesn't scale for me.

By way of comparison, for that price I can get 20 private repos on Github, which consume oodles of space and networking resources.


People upvote it because it because (a) product beta launches are rightly HN fodder and (b) it saves the story in your account so it serves as a "I'm busy now I'll try this tonight".


Yes on the slow development rate. I pretty much signed on to their mailing list as soon as they announced themselves. After hearing nothing for over a year I gave up and switched from bricks and mortar to ING (now Capital 360) which solved most of my issues, so my motivation to go through the bank changing hassle is now really small. I think it took something like 3 years to actually get the "you can now use us" email.


The problem with these (and all the other alternatives I've seen in this post so far) is that they ignore the one thing that locks people into Evernote despite the bugs, poor interface etc: scanner-support and OCR. Sure, if you have your information in digital form already, there's a bunch of decent solutions, but in terms of killing the paper mountain I am not aware of anything that supports that workflow, certainly not that easily.


what do you mean by "killing the paper mountain"? The OCR feature of Evernote Premium?


The statement made upthread was that (a) github destroyed open source social structure and (b) has resulted in buggy releases when there are releases.

I would have liked to see some examples in such a broad statement. I am struggling to think of an O/S project I used pre-github that fits the bill.


Why not give money to the Guardian to extend their US operations.... they have been doing a stellar job the last few years


Is it that ironic? Git is inherently decentralised, github is just a publication method. Everybody's repo is still good if github gets nuked and can be used as the new public. It's nothing like, say, Facebook where They Have All The Data And You Don't. Self-hosting with Gitlab is no different, except to have the public repo sit on a different server.


Its not just a publication method. If you loose your github repo for some reason you loose

  * the issues
  * the wiki
  * the community because your local repo is fine, 
    but nobody knows any other remote than github.


Good points. However:

Issues - I'm sure these can get recreated, even the discussions. In many cases, people will have those threads in their email.

Wiki - In Github's case, this is also a git repo.

Community - GitHub is rarely the only mechanism used to manage a community. There's likely a domain name and mailing list of some form.

Losing all of the above is certainly painful but I'm trying to point out that it's not irrecoverable. A better question might be how painful would it be to lose that (and the likelihood of losing it) as compared to other options.


You know, sourceforge was once the place to be for hosting your SVN projects, forums, etc., and nobody batted an eye when they ceased to be the community centroid. Similarly with github, if it shut down or something new and shinier came along the projects would move there before you could say "merge conflict."


And now I dread seeing a sourceforge link on a project site. Absolutely, chest-clenchingly dread.


Yes the wiki is a git repo, but the percentage of people who have a (current) checkout of their project wiki is probably below 0.1% of all users.

Larger project have a domain and a mailinglist but github hosts thousands of small projects which do not exist outside of it, and in theory it should be trivial to keep a second remote and put it in the readme or sync it over git in some way.


You're right about the issues, I wish GitHub used some plain-text format with an optional UI for that (e.g. plain org-mode files), but the wiki on GitHub is just a plain Git repo with Markdown files, it's not centralized.

I don't see how you lose the community more than with any hosting method. If GitHub were nuked off the face of the earth you have all the contributors in your Git history, just send them a mail with the new location of the repo.


You are missing the whole point being that if github is own and assume core developers don't have t latest opt you are screed. If you want to promote your idea, get to. Sage. Don use github and show people your new decentralized github clone.


You guys are bullying him without a proper reason.. cause they (redecentralize.org) are not creating the technologies themselves.. they are just making the efforts and projects of others public and organized.. therefore they dont need to do this sort of thing themselves..

Their goal are being achieved: To spread the word about projects that can create a descentralized internet..

So, can we please give them a break, and the credits for their nice work?


It's become pretty standard on HN that publishing on Github gets you flamed.


A bit of a stretch, but each GitHub wiki is also a git repository


In fact the actual court decision quoted has everything you would want to know about what was on the web page:

14 Webley, “School Shooter” Video Game to Reenact Columbine, Virginia Tech Killings, Time (Apr. 20, 2011), http://newsfeed.time.com/2011 / 04 / 20 / school - shooter - video - game - reenacts-columbine-virginia-tech-killings. After a Web site that made School Shooter available for download removed it in response to mounting criticism, the developer stated that it may make the game available on its own Web site. Inside the Sick Site of a School Shooter Mod (Mar. 26, 2011), http://ssnat.com.


You mean like Judge Alsup, who taught himself Java so that he could rule that Oracle's APIs are not copyrightable? Or Judge Wells, who ordered SCO to show him the code and then threw the case out when the failed to do so? We haven't done so bad on tech judges recently - it seems to me that the problem with the lavabit/NSA cases is not so much the technical side, but the classic one of government powers, and the fact that there is no explicit constitutional protections of privacy.


Note this:

"Tsay took the actual audition recordings of the top 3 finalists"

It seems entirely possible to me that the top 3 finalists in a prestigious musical competition are so close in skill (or so complementary in strengths and weaknesses) that the judging is dominated by extraneous factors.

This is quite unlike the wine example, where people who allegedly can tell the geographic provenance of a wine fail to do so.


As a longtime musician myself, I can certainly tell when someone is making mistakes. in one example, i've listened to so many versions of beethoven opus 111 that i've noticed a world-famous pianist who played the bass line in a single measure differently than what was written (sounded better his way, IMHO).

but what makes one "best" is highly subjective. i'm not sure what the research proves other than perhaps it's harder to move on from adolescent disappointments than is commonly acknowledged.

A more relevant question for the snob factor is "how do critics recognize when NEW music is great, average or crap." because that's pretty much what wine is - a constant cycle of new product, varying from year to year, even when it came from the same vines.

the valid "snob" angle here for both wine and music is that we aren't supposed to judge based on pure sensory experience. For example, a very sweet wine is going to be palatable to a lot of folks, but we're supposed to recognize the subtleties of a dry pinot noir instead. or compare most anything by john cage to anything by beethoven. or compare beethoven to justin timberlake.

there is a valid case to be made that once you learn to have "cultivated" tastes, you can pick out all these details and truly appreciate them. i once participated in a blind wine tasting where only one woman out of 30 people could reliably pick out the fancy wines from the cheap ones. for her, i expect the process of drinking wine is a lot different than for the rest of us yokels. Tasting things we can't notice, and appreciating them differently. good goal to aspire to, if we care, otherwise just admit we have no clue, be happy, and move on.


I played trumpet for years as a kid. I was terrible at it, and eventually gave it up.

But I did get something interesting out of it - I know how hard it is to play a trumpet well, and when someone does play it well, I enjoy listening to it very much.

When I point out fine trumpet playing to others who have no experience with the trumpet, they just shrug their shoulders.

But I still derive obvious pleasure from hearing it, clearly more so than others. I think it is real pleasure, not just snobbery.


As a corollary, I can't distinguish good piano playing from great. The nuance is lost on me.

Interestingly, I can also recognize the 'lip' of particular trumpet players. Each one has his unique sound, despite playing identical instruments. Herb Alpert has his casual elegance, Al Hirt's in-your-face aggressive style, and Maurice Andre his amazing tone.


As a side note, the explosion in terroirs from the new world has really (seems to have) made the notion of wine snobbery somewhat archaic. In the 19/20th century perhaps it was a mark of distinction, to put some investment in this. The math is far more dauting to have an encyclopaedic understanding of the field than it was in, say 1930. The growth of new areas, new techniques, and the everchaning weather has made this a fools errand, and a false class marker at best.


Dispense with the class markers and terroirs.

I wonder how many self-professed wine snobs can even tell reds from whites.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Rmm-xqRHGw


And dispense with the ridiculous prices. My takeaway regarding wine would be (If I drank any) that anything more than $10-$15 per bottle is probably snobbery- or collectors markup.


and this is just another kind of snobbery - a snobbery toward "perceived snobbery"


> This is quite unlike the wine example, where people who allegedly can tell the geographic provenance of a wine fail to do so.

Being French and not being a big wine person (I do have other vices though :) ), those results (see the linked Priceonomics article, or [1]) amuse me quite a bit.

Especially when I brought them up to my dad, a typical French wine snob who frequently goes to wine expos, wine tastings (the kind where you spit it out, not the kind where you get wasted with your friends on a bus in Napa). He entirely rejected the validity of those experiments, claiming that they were probably rigged or done sloppily. This reminds me that I should do my own blind test with him next time I go home. The human brain is a funny, funny thing.

[1]: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/frontal-cortex/2012/06...


I think there is a tendency to overestimate the conclusions of the cited study. We definitely should be wary of price tags -- I've had $10 and $15 bottles of wine that kicked the pants off many $50-100 bottles. I'm also definitely skeptical of people who believe they can divine the vineyard a bottle came from by taste alone.

There definitely are, however, differences among wines. Whether or not the price reflects these differences, it's not wrong to have preferences.

Two years ago I went to a coffee tasting. At one point, the brewer handed everyone two marked cups of distinct coffees. He described the two by flavor profile, but didn't say which cup was which. After everyone had a taste, he quizzed us by straw poll. Almost everyone correctly identified which cup matched which profile (they were very distinct beans), but people's preferences fell 50/50. Afterwards, he revealed that the price/lb difference between the two cups was about $90.

There are also good reasons for these price differences. Ethiopian coffee beans are highly regarded, but are also often priced highly because the supply and export of these beans, due to political reasons, is volatile.

I don't think you were implying all wine is the same :) I just wanted to make the point that nobody should begrudge themselves a good cup of coffee, wine, beer, etc. Never trust the price tag, be skeptical of consumer ratings, but do trust your taste buds and drink what makes you happy!


One could argue similar on wine. Only a very small subset of people can actually detect the provenance. Most of us can't. There is a big gap between trained Sommelier and so-called expert. They may sound the same, which makes it confusing.

A slight digression in the topic of music, I recall reading (in Freakonomics or Gladwell?) a study which showed that people tend to like music purely because they hear it more often. In essence, there isn't an objective standard.


This is one reason why I think copyright needs reformed. We made the Beatles famous by playing their records all the time, we (the public) should get some recognition for that in terms of shortened terms for popular works.


I think that may have some negative system gaming outcomes, like playing a "sure to be a success" song on repeat from 2am to 6am every morning so that you don't have to pay royalties on it for the next 40 years. With a very large number of stations being owned by a very small number of players this kind of "cooperation" in a market is inevitable.

The primary effect of this game would be a substantial reduction in the diversity of music, because off times which could have introduced new(er) sounds are now channel-stuffed with top40 to eliminate their copyright before the top40 becomes an oldie. Also if only top40 music is free, competitive pressure will annihilate all other forms of music because they would cost money. This also applies to retail sales, why pay $15 for something new when you could pay $10 for something popular. So two forces acting together means you'd end up with zero choices for music.

However I'm not convinced that the elimination of the Music Industry would be bad for Music. Even if it creates a wasteland, what lives in wastelands tends to be interesting.


Free and out of copyright are two very different things.


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