Thank you, GitHub

Another way to put it: any CI properly integrated to Github will be #1 CI by sheer market size.

Gitlab has a similar YAML system from more than a decade, it's low friction, pretty polished and highly reliable. But it will always be a more niche product by the effect of Gitlab being way smaller that Github.

I don't see the reply I made here with that throwaway (shadowban?), so I'm doing it with my other one.

> for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to

Apparently not! Using throwaways, people have upvoted me like crazy. Hundreds of points per month, for a person with no identity. If it kept going at the same pace, I would outrank some of the highest-point users within a year or two, all from using throwaway. Is that not community? And if it's not - isn't it better than community? Isn't upvoting someone you don't know, don't owe anything to, who you hold no preconceived ideas about, actually a more honest way to interact with a community?

When I get upvoted, I'm happy. Me being happy encourages me to post in a happy mood, so I create happier comments (on average). When I get downvoted or ignored (on my 'real' account), I get angry and depressed, and that makes for much less happy comments (and just a bad feeling all around). Using the throwaways not only makes me less angry and depressed, but it also enables creating content that people clearly approve of.

> Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community

There have been throwaways on this site for ages, in addition to known people. The community hasn't disappeared as far as I can tell. So it seems like you can, in fact, have it both ways. In addition, I've been a member of a lot of different communities. A lot of the time, the ones that banter on about how much of a close-knit community they are, enable some of the most toxic behavior. There are some great aspects to community, and some horrifying ones. Rather than trying to change the community to fit the standards we think it should have, perhaps we should encourage the behavior that metrics show have a more positive outcome. I could be crazy, but it seems like anything that inspires more upvotes (without the content being hateful, vitriolic, judgemental or divisive) seems like it's worth keeping.

Maybe I missed something, and there's some metrics-driven approach where you're pushing back on all throwaway behavior because its existence (regardless of content) leads to worse outcomes. Or maybe you just consider 'most' throwaways to post divisive content, and push back on all of them. Or maybe you just don't like the idea of throwaways, I dunno. All I know is this little experiment with throwaways has made me much happier on HN.

> If it would be "easily quantifiable", you would not see in 2021 still bank ATM running damn Windows XP or nuclear power plant under Win2000 with some old deprecated crap supervisor tools.

> It is a common drama with proprietary solutions, they are seducing to install and a nightmare to maintain.

The fact the software is "proprietary" or not is largely irrelevant to whether or not the systems-integrator who made those ATMs and Nuclear Power plants is acting responsibly. Had they chosen Linux then that ATM would still be sitting there with just-an-outdated version of some embedded Linux distro.

There is an argument that if they used a GPLv3 or other anti-Tivo license that the end owner or operator of the machine would be able to upgrade the host OS software themselves, however in both of those cases (ATMs and power-plants) what makes-the-thing-run is not the OS but the application software (BankAtm.exe and NuclearReactorMonitor.exe) which will have their own dependencies and (knowing most software) will just break when running on an updated OS - and it'd be even worse on Linux because Linux does not have a stable applications ABI between major releases: the software would need to be recompiled.

Now if the application software itself were also open-source, then I agree: that does help, but I'm not convinced that's a solution either because I can assure you that companies like banks and infrastructure operators are not going to be happy having to do patch-tuesday and recompiling their software on a regular basis for hardware they'd really prefer to leave alone and stable. Hence why they're air-gapped (or at least meant to be air-gapped).

Being non-proprietary is not a panacea.

Lying to your bank is typically not a good strategy when it comes to compliance. You can get asked on a form and if you lie, they have a very good case later on to close your account.

Microsoft acquired Skype more than 10 years ago...

Surely they screwed up the massive lead in the space that Skype had, but I can't say they "EEE"'d it. It was just badly run.