When asked "Do you teach the poor to endure their lot?" Mother Teresa replied "I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people."
She was, until the end of her life anyway, a very devout Christian but her order was a bit fringe. She didn't really provide medical care, she referred to her facilities as "houses of the dying" and their suffering was a good thing as it brought them closer to God so pain management was basically non existent. There are reams of statements from medical professionals, Indian and Western, that visited her facilities and the general consensus was that they were "horrifying" and lacked even the most basic attention to cleanliness.
She did feed a lot of people, but not many compared to other charities operating in the same places that had smaller budgets.
I also can't dismiss the fact that she used her reputation to support war criminals like the Duvalier family, although in other comments you do dismiss this so ... sure, I'll just concentrate on the rest.
If you do believe in the christian afterlife then perhaps she is a great person as she probably did convert a lot of sick people in India as they suffered and became more likely to accept Jesus as their saviour. If you don't then she let poor people die unnecessarily and intentionally heaped unnecessary suffering on the poor.
So like I said, definitely, unequivocally, based on her own statements alone, she is not a good canonical example of selfless altruism since a good canonical example would not be judged only by a fringe sect of Christianity that looks to enhance the suffering of the poor.
also, she and most othe rreligious still advocate over population and against several sane health treatments. not to mention education.
no little good religion does compensate for the long term damage.
It's a much better system, faster, more powerful and more flexible but not centralized and you have to understand what you are doing.
It's not like this is a feature github discovered and added. They made an easier, prettier and less powerful version of an existing feature. Certainly not a bad idea, git's command line UI is ridiculously bad UI so a super simple point and click interface was a fantastic way to grab market share and get non-command line people involved.
> the comments in a pull request are an excellent feature
Really? I mean, compared to nothing I guess it would seem great. But since I'm used to an email thread serving the same purpose those comments on github pull requests seem awful to me.
"Build software better, together."
"Github: social coding."
Once again, the correct answer is "use the right tool for the job."
http://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/
You could also use Mailgun, mandrillapp.com, etc. I believe they all provide at least 10-12K emails/month for free, by calling a RESTful web api.
PANIC and flock to HN to comment on a minor outage!!! - wait, no. git is a distributed system. You continue as you were and nothing changes.
In this way, DVCS's are resilient to individual server failure.
Are you really going to spend less than 1 hour maintain this sort-of-github instance you have?
Obviously, a sort of pre-built image to spawn "own" Gitolite/Gitlab/whatever instance would be nice, so noone but those particularly interested in the process would have to spend their time setting things up. But I suspect such images/build scripts already exist, it's just that I didn't even bothered to search for them.
Try http://git-scm.com/ for a great (official) tutorial.
My public stuff all goes to github, and my private repos are all on BitBucket; virtually no cost to me that way and I use each service as it's promoted (imo).
in my experience, pros: - full control (he is not using this as he and all other probably commit as user git) - commit hooks
contra: - you take the time to setup, debug, maintain. (track all those pesky security updates) - you have to backup. - people already have their keys setup at github.
also, about the paying for privacy... i have two github accounts. one with my real name another with a pseudonym.
and to conclude, after some time, i just moved all my code to bitbucket. initially because i rather mercurial and they have both. but then because you get a few private repos
Until relatively recently (at least that was the case about an year ago) having multiple GH accounts was a TOS violation. (And I needed a pseudonymous account, so that drove me off to BitBucket.) They seem to have changed that, so you're not allowed to have more than one free account per human.
But (and you knew that "but" was coming) github is particularly useful and not amenable to the kind of gaming that Facebook and Google have indulged in. Git is truly distributed, and if github ever tried to block or manipulate repos there are full copies all over the place. It would be very easy (and dare I say such action would come swiftly) to react to any such wayward behavior on the part of github, mainly because of the nature of git.
So: definitely host your own git repo, but if you use github for collaborating on public open source projects, you really aren't running any kind of risk that github will ever hinder your access or control in anyway.
That said, I still use github (or bitbucket, etc.) when I want to share code - it's still the best place to do that.
I just don't need their private service, which appears to be the same case as the author.
Github provides excellent interface and workflow patterns for code collaboration. I don't know, maybe for some it's reasonable to swap patches via mail, but for me hassle of downloading attachments from gmail into the right folder is just not worth it.
Also, laugh all you want, but rendered README.md and having all code at glance are life-savers. It's so much easier to get a hold of what another open source library does, if it has nicely formatted README with examples. Bonus points for gh-pages hosted docs.
Sometimes, while its fun to reinvent things, it just makes more sense to use what's there.