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At what time of day do famous programmers work?

ivan.bessarabov.com

141–150 of 215 posts

Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#141
post #70
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Temp branches or tags are probably the "proper" way to stash a history of changes in git. `git stash` is mostly a convenience feature for when you want to quickly clean up your working tree to eg. pull latest changes from a remote.

I like the approach of creating a new temporary branch for changes I need to stash. When I come back to the work I usually bring the changes back to the branch I'm working in with `git cherry-pick -n `. The -n flag cherry picks the changes over without making a new commit, so I can finish whatever I was doing and then make a proper commit.

I use stgit for this kind of thing.

Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#142

My gut reaction to this was the same as everyone else - to question the validity of using commits as a measurement of time worked. But then I read further and realized that this isn't a research study, it is just a clever script to output some data from github. So I'm going to go run it on a couple of my projects, see what it says, and enjoy that someone put it together.

I've run similar git stats scripts (I think it was a Debian package actually) on my own projects, and for me at least, they were pretty reflective of my own working habits, with a time lag of an hour or two in the mornings.

Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#143
> Linus is the author of the Linux operating system

Hmmmm... Not quite. Albeit I am a massive fan of the Linux kernel, though Torvalds is _not_ the author of the Linux operating system (if we assume that Linux is the equivalent of GNU utilities + the Linux kernel).

Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#144
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the reason for confusion is that you seem to say that people doesn't even commit their work when they work, but only when they're pushing as well. dchest is (seemingly) asking why don't you commit when you're done, but delay the pushing (according to your policies)?

The confusion was my fault, but I think is mostly gone now. I initially described it as commits when I was thinking of pushes, partly because I’m lumping both git and Perforce experience together. I edited my comments to be more clear, and it seems to have helped. The question asked is valid, and we do commit often, we only avoid pushes to shared spaces at night, so some commits may have representative time stamps. A…

This isn't entirely correct. Git commits have two timestamps: the author timestamp and the commit timestamp. Git only shows the author timestamp by default, and that timestamp definitely survives `git commit --amend` and other operations like rebase with squash. I've had commits where the author timestamp was many months older than my last modification to the commit before finally pushing it upstream.

Unfortunately, TFA doesn't discuss which timestamp is being looked at, though that leads me to suspect that it's looking at the author timestamp because that's the default.

Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#145
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I already commented on this somewhere else. What's the problem with that? Are you implying female/black programmers are different? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20469963

No, he's implying that they are underrepresented.

Yes, why does it matter? Underrepresented? Who is? The people that are not different but yet are different? I don't get it. I see a couple of people with their commit times being analyzed. If there were black and/or females in that list, great. I did not waste a single thought about it and wouldn't have even if there were some or many in it. Why would I? It's just some people. Forcing a quota on certain "types of people"? Sure, go ahead. Ironically you'll be part of the problem you are trying to fix then, though.

Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#146

Are the commits represented in UTC time when using the script?

It's in local time as an offset of UTC. So, if you pool by repo then you could have two commits at 13:00 even though they were commited at different times of the day, but in different time zones.

Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#147
post #143

> Linus is the author of the Linux operating system Hmmmm... Not quite. Albeit I am a massive fan of the Linux kernel, though Torvalds is _not_ the author of the Linux operating system (if we assume that Linux is the equivalent of GNU utilities + the Linux kernel).

Why would we assume this? A kernel is absolutely an operating system.

Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#149
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, he's implying that they are underrepresented.

Yes, why does it matter? Underrepresented? Who is? The people that are not different but yet are different? I don't get it. I see a couple of people with their commit times being analyzed. If there were black and/or females in that list, great. I did not waste a single thought about it and wouldn't have even if there were some or many in it. Why would I? It's just some people. Forcing a quota on certain "types of peo…

I'm not the person making the original argument but I agree that they have a point.

Someone creates a list of "famous programmers" which only includes whites males. This just further cements the image of programmers being white males, when in reality the field is more diverse and when it isn't people are trying to make it a bit more diverse through various angles (mentoring, removing biases from hiring, etc).

I'm not blaming the person writing the blog post but the comment pointing that out has a valid point and something to keep in mind and develop some sensitivity for to create a more inclusive environment for everyone involved.

> I did not waste a single thought about it and wouldn't have even if there were some or many in it.

That is called privilege and means you are not affected by it and you just don't see the problem. Which is a very understandable behavior and I'm not blaming you for it. But maybe in the future if you, me or someone other white male is in a position to find sources to quote, or create a list like that we could keep that in mind and look outside of the bubble we are living in here on HN and see if there's something that we missed before.

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