skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fedora was never a very good distro from personal experience ( I've only tried 7-9 though ). And from that fedora really isn't any harder than another distro and is themed for similar audiences as ubuntu.

Debian and Ubuntu have one major advantage going for them package management through apt and aptitude.
Your response, neurotech, suggests you really shouldn't practice brain-surgery on yourself.
A valid criticism.
It may have been a lie but I enjoyed that lie. When a girl asks you if she looks pretty (and she doesn't), do you tell the truth? The morality of lies is a matter of individual perception. That subjectivity is making me less and less concerned about whether it is right or wrong to lie. These days I think in cost/benefit trade-offs. The trade-off in this story was a good one, his reputation doesn't seem to have taken any damage.
First time. Thanks for the reference.
Here's Bruce Schneier's post on the event http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/09/woman_arrested...
I don't know, but they do: http://tlrobinson.net/skitches/Screen%20shot%202010-01-16%20...

Edit: Hah, I swear I didn't notice that Growl notification in the corner until just now...
His assertion that Ubuntu has made Linux a monoculture because it's up to 30% market share makes me happy.

He's dreadfully wrong, but it's nice to see a group so consensus-phobic. It means I certainly won't have to worry about a Linux monoculture any time soon.

We also won't have commercial apps running smoothly on all Linux boxes any time soon for the same reason, but lately Wine is handling that for me pretty well. Which is quite amusing, all things considered.
If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.) At karma 56k it's true ;)
I'd like more of these social engineering stories on HN.
> "Everyone else is left in the email wild west"

In my experience some anti-spam organisations seem to want to keep that area wild. Or they just don't see the standard problems from their high horses. I get most of my servers listed as dynamic at least twice a year just because the ISP happens to provide residential dynamic DSL in the same netblock. And I can't change the rDNS of course, because the ISP doesn't allow it for people with ranges smaller than /28. Good luck explaining the situation to sorbs or people who block based on sorbs' dynamic list unconditionally.
Intel cards also work well on Linux. That said - Intel anything works well on Linux.
Keeping the discussion at a business level I would think would be the most productive. I don't see how throwing politics into it is going to help the situation.
The correct version is: "Those who can, do. Those who can't, work for the government." Or have you forgotten these are all gov't employed teachers; and do you think most private teachers are this incompetent (private school teachers are an in between case, how bad they are depends partly on state requirements).
Yes - I agree this felt like flame-bait.

I found the absence of any references to Debian odd. I say that because for me the choice among Linux distributions is largely a choice of what kind of package management you want to use.

One thing I related to in the article was the reference to the early days of trying Linux:

"I think the first version of Linux I ever tried was from some CD's I found in a magazine back in the mid to late 90's, I think it was version 5 of Redhat."

I like Ubuntu because I have always been more comfortable with dpkg/apt than rpm/yum. I have come to like yum alot more and find CentOS to be a fine choice for servers.

My fondness for Debian is not rational though. It was the first distribution I successfully used. Something just clicked - the install worked, the documentation made sense, apt worked pretty well.

I have dabbled with Gentoo and Slackware and can see the attraction of source based installing. Ditto with NetBSD and pkgsrc. But Debian was my "first"...
Well I'm sorry to see you brush off my opinion piece without actually addressing even a single point.

Just for clarification though: My point isn't that Ubuntu is related to Windows, my point is that it seems Ubuntu is specifically targeting ex-Windows users as prospective clients, and that this fact could explain some of its recent behavior.

And no, I dont think it matters which desktop I'm running, but I do think it matters that the Linux desktop community stay a deverse field, and if the trends we are seeing continue for a few more years that may no longer be the case.
I got the suspicion that Haskell notation was used because he'd written those commands in Haskell; could be wrong though.
Your characterization of my comment is unfair and untrue. I didn't "cherry pick" anything; the above code is from my only significant experience with any Apple-designed API. The grandparent comment in glowing and general terms praised Apple APIs as noticeably better than other APIs, and this ran strongly contrary to my own experience with them. I even mentioned that this was old code, that QTKit has been released in the meantime, and that it is probably better.

I'm not sure why you think that old APIs designed for old architectures are obviously bad or are not relevant to the discussion. How is C substantially different than in 1994, that newer APIs would be better? Why do you think that architectures from 15 years ago required bad APIs? I can think of many excellent APIs that I was using ten years ago or more.

Feel free to say that the new Apple APIs are much better than the old ones, but my experience says that historically Apple has had some very poor ones.
It's not often? Has it happened before?
>package management through apt and aptitude

I thought that this would be my biggest hurdle, but it turned out to be a non-issue as yum has exceeded my expectations, so far at least.
They're written in Perl. Take a look at the sources:

tmp: http://conway.rutgers.edu/~ccshan/wiki/blog/posts/Higher-ord...

keep:
http://conway.rutgers.edu/~ccshan/wiki/blog/posts/Higher-ord...
Arguments like this guy and his friend had are the things that distro wars are made of, and it's this sort of infighting that keeps 1996..2010 from becoming "The Year Of The Linux Desktop"

As for Linux distros, I prefer highly flexible ones that start out small and powerful, but are easily customized and rolled into whatever you could possibly want. A long time ago, I thought that meant Gentoo, but I've acquired a soft spot on my heart for Arch Linux. Every install is YOUR distro, built your way.

That's great for me because I know exactly what packages I want to use for word processing, window management, web browsing, music playing, and graphics editing.

The difference, really, between some of the more bloated and popular distributions comes down to whose set of broad-sweeping assumptions do you ascribe to best.

Most computer users don't really care what program comes up for a given task. They just want it to do that task. To that end, both Ubuntu and Fedora should work just fine and I really see no need to get one's knickers in a twist over semantics like this. +1 to all who said it's flame bait.
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This reads to me like the writer had an inferiority complex seed planted in his mind by a peer, and eventually ended up acting on that subconscious trigger to modify his choices even though the follow up attempt at rationally examining the claims originally made yielded nothing beyond marketing material.

30% adoption in a tiny sector does not a monoculture make, Ubuntu really just is a better mousetrap from the perspective of wanting a low maintenance Linux based environment. Any project which is open in Fedora is just as open in Ubuntu.
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He is suggesting that if there is no public API for Flash to use then there isn't one for Parallels to use either, yet Parallels manages a better job running Flash in IE on Windows all virtualised than Flash manages on it's own.

Parallels does not have updated video drivers from Apple, why should flash need them to match what parallels does now? Whatever Parallels installs or does to handle dismay updates, Flash plugin could do.
I used to use Fedora, until I found out that one of its leads used to develop malware for the FBI.

http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2009/04/current-red-hat-linux-em...

At which point I switched to Ubuntu.

Now, that may seem a bit hasty, but I'd rather not have the FBI involved with my operating system at all, thank you.
And also it's possible that Andrew is lying to bury his past.
> There is a lesson there.

Oh, I get what lesson he wants people to take away from it. It's highlighted in bold with neon signs. It's kind of similar to a lot of what Tim Ferriss does.

I'm just not sure if that's anything I want to use. But despite that, it was a good read.
The UNIX APIs were written nearly 40 years ago, and somehow managed to achieve performance and economy without giving up abstraction and clarity.
I think they were bought by AltaVista...
I found myself lost in the Carver Mead interview linked in the blog post instead: http://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thompson1/People/CarverMead.h...

Pretty convincing for someone, such as myself, with almost no knowledge of quantum physics, and hence extremely confused as to the logic behind it all.
I'm sorry, I guess I wasn't very clear.

What do you think the Linux Desktop landscape will look like in 5 years if Ubuntu continues to rise at the same pace or even nearly the same pace that it is now?
Visa for Startup founders (help tell the Whitehouse it is important)
I think in theory interesting automated content should be possible to achieve, for example by simulating a "real" world. Most MMORPGs I have seen so far don't seem to simulate much at all (some prices for goods at the most).

The counterargument is probably that it is too difficult to emulate the entities in a MMORPG well enough to make it interesting. To which I reply: Conway's game of life is interesting, and it is just a very simple cellular emulator.

One of the game ideas I have considered: imagine the players have landed on a huge alien planet, and somehow must figure out how to survive. To survive, they have to cooperate with the alien life forms, for example figure out how to farm them, prevent their extinction, mutate them to become nice herd animals, and so on. So the life forms wouldn't have to display human intelligence - they could be plants and animals, and perhaps it could still be interesting. Besides, players should be allowed to program robots to work for them. Maybe they would have to struggle with environmental hazards and what not.

Personally I think I would be interested in such a game, probably seeing it more as a platform for research and experimentation than a mere game. But I grant that it might never get a following remotely as big as WoW :-)
ATI recently released a Linux version of their Catalyst Control Center. I had a fairly smooth experience on Lenny Debian with the ATI Radeon X1550.
Nethack seems to succeed with generating interesting automated content. It is even fun to just read the "elevation stories", each of them is different.
I see your point, but I think if there was more unification, The Linux Movement" would maybe stand a chance at gaining more ground on the desktop market.
I think you hinted at the real problem. Even if you have good insurance you may not be able to see your physician for a couple days. Some people choose to visit an emergency department when they want some kind of immediate relief from a non-urgent problem. If you show up while having a heart attack you aren't going to sit in the waiting room.
Google Users in China Fear Losing Important Tool
People in China are quite aware of the fact that the "thought police" are out there, and poke fun at it all the time. They also know they are a developing country. I hypothesize that the government gets away with this only because it's still developing, and not enough people care about political stuff like this... yet.
Utilities for Combinatrics
A dozen services are hacked every week. What discussion is there to be had about this?
I agree, but the trouble is how to gain unification without becoming a mono-culture.

I'm worried what might happen if this continues for another 5 years http://www.google.com/trends?q=Fedora+Desktop,+Ubuntu+Deskto...
http://freshmeat.net/projects/telepathic-critterdrug
I wholeheartedly agree with this man. Of course, I'm currently unemployed and would receive heavy bias from a person using this technique.
If everybody had such an umbrella, could we start zapping each other with lightning in the street? :-) (I must admit I have no idea what or how much 20 tesla are).
Freenode Spam Attack
Not really. Alfie Kohn does have a book called No Contest, where he mentions in passing how competition is used to control people. But it's not really more than a couple pages out of the whole book. And there is another book called Measurement in Psychology that talks about how what most people think of measurements aren't; but that's not really about social control either.

The topic really deserves its own book, but none exists as far as I know.
"Thus, by creating a direct correlation between in-game power and time spent grinding, every player will at least have the potential to reach the top 20% (although the Pareto principle will still apply to the amount of time spent grinding)."

This is like translating your time and effort into worthless in-game currency (reputation in game). At least if it was based on real life skills like accuracy and response times, you could train these real life skills and get benefits in and out of game.

Call of duty rocks, no need to grind (as long you're not trying to level up). I can just hop in and dominate. I imagine that people who play Call of Duty online are the least likely to also play World of Warcraft regularly.
Apparently there is come strange ctcp traffic going around that is causing me to constantly get bounced from freenode. Anyone know how to change ctcp settings in bip?
subscription fees + time invested in leveling = sunk costs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs#Loss_aversion_and_th...

players will spend more time playing than they would otherwise want to due to their perception of sunk costs, hours of gameplay provided expands to meet this demand with a grinding mechanism being the cheapest type of gameplay to offer
Completely unimpressive, useless hack.
Grinding is only boring and repetitive if you just try to be average while doing it allowing for a huge margin of error. Compare this to playing chess or poker, is it "grinding" there to play the same thing over thousands of times? If you are just mindlessly shoving pieces around a board, going "all in" every hand without looking at your cards, or if you just randomly "grind" -- yes all 3 of those activities sound horribly boring to me.
But the market can't force people to buy their assets. Ultimately of course that is true for money, too (people could go back to bartering or whatever), but it seems a much farther stretch.
Mostly tuning in again to express my amusement over the downvotes from the (certainly large number of) flash haters. :-)

As for your points, yes, I didn't mean to argue any of that. Just wanted to set straight that from a business angle Adobe doesn't need to care about that 6% rounding error at this point.

They're waging a platform war which is different to, say, the browser war. Their dominance is so overwhelming that developers have no choice but use them, no matter how much it sucks - adobe knows that very well. That may not have been the reason for their consequent neglect towards the minority platforms from day 1. But not spending more resources today on remedying that situation is most likely a conscious decision (mixed with a bit of incompetence).

They know that making said developers crazy happy at this point doesn't help them one bit against the coming open standards. When the HTML video tag arrives then flash will be pushed out of the video niche, no matter how good it is or how happy the developers are.

Consequently there's simply not much reason for them to spend resources on making the OSX or Linux plugin better. Their focus is on the mobile market now, which is a battle that they really need to win if they want to maintain any relevance in the future.
Augh! I'm seeing this more and more. This was a fine comment. It was not a troll; it was not rude. I personally don't agree with it, but voting is not for agreement or disagreement. That's what responses are for. Don't downvote comments which aren't trollish or otherwise rude just because you disagree with them.

(Background: this comment was downvoted. I've seen this happen at least 5 times in the past two days, it annoyed me, I commented.)
I think sysadmins and the server market would keep "Linux" as a whole from becoming a monoculture. But I think "Linux On The Desktop" would probably fare far better as a monoculture. That's my opinion, obviously. I'm generally an Operating system agnostic. I have OS X and Windows 7 dual booting on my MacBook. I'm writing this post from an old workstation running Ubuntu Jaunty (because I'm too lazy to upgrade manually and the in-place upgrade to Karmic has broken 2 of my virtual machines), I have an XP Pro workstation and OpenBSD server next to me, and a Sun Ultra 5 running Solaris on the top shelf. I play with this stuff ALL DAY LONG. Most of the other OSes I listed in this post are "a monoculture" and seem to be doing just fine.
Yeah, I've read it. I've also realized most of it doesn't matter. What points I lose here can be made up x10 in one or two comments agreeing/pushing popular opinion.
PG has been given [literally] dozens of great suggestions like yours, yet has not implemented them. I think that he is trying to cultivate a respectful community through conversation (i.e. comments), instead of applying technological solutions.
Agreed. Also, instead of hiding all comment points, perhaps the score can be hidden when it's 1 and lower, making it ambiguous, while retaining scores for comments with 2+ points.
Maybe somewhere there's a guy calling himself the greatest programmer in the world, but he can't answer any interview questions because it's all classified.

The government seems to hire a LOT of these people; I meet them all the time.
When I started at my current (also first post-college) job, I was a contractor for about 8 months before becoming a regular employee. Two of my coworkers have made the same contractor->FTE transition. When I started it was explicitly a contract-to-hire position... for whatever reason we apparently don't do that any more, although our latest full-time position was first offered to some of the current contractors before our boss started giving us resumes to look at.

I could definitely see this reducing the applicant pool, although a surprising number of people have been looking for hotels on their first day, and then live here during the week and drive several hours home on the weekends.
I for one can't wait for that day to arrive. Sorry about your livelihood, but I trust that you'd find it easy to retool for HTML5+JS.
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Actually, I'm all for diversity. My points still stand, I think:

1. Ubuntu is not targeting Windows users more than any other desktop operating system does. Ubuntu tries to create a really great desktop in a world in which the overwhelming majority of desktops run windows. If Ubuntu is converting users of existing operating systems (as opposed to gaining users who have never used personal computers before) then most of them are likely to be users of Windows. The same is true for Fedora and any other desktop operating system.

2. It doesn't matter what distro you're running. It's great that you experiment with different distros and I definitely think the GNU/Linux community benefits from this diversity, but it doesn't really matter in large scale. Most computer users don't choose which operating system to use - they get it with their computer.
And, why promote a direct link to a site that's under malicious-actor control?
Researchers discover quantum optical effect predicted by Newton
Android is, in a way, a Linux distro that is growing strong now and is likely to grow even more now that Google is selling sexy branded phones running it. The same might be true in the future for Chrome OS (an Ubuntu derivative but a very different beast none-the-less). I don't think the evolution of Linux ends with Ubuntu.
How China exposed Google's hypocrisy
Full page: http://www.wired.co.uk/wired-magazine/archive/2010/02/featur...
This kind of clear, accessible relation of everyday observation to real science is what Dawkins became known for, excels at, and what I wish he would stick to. His strident anti-God rhetoric elsewhere does much to damage the reputation of evolutionary science, turning it from a widely-accepted theory into a symbol of the inevitable triumph of rationality over irrationality, to be fought tooth-and-nail by religious zealots everywhere.
I agree it's not a good idea to visit a site known to be under attack, but merely reporting the attack will cause an increase in traffic.

Here's a screenshot in case you'd like to see the site without visiting: http://drp.ly/edn98
Best introduction to coding/hacking?
I'm looking for a good, general introduction to programming, any suggestions?
For the sake of your users' privacy and security, use TLS (or IPSec) and a certificate that identifies your server. Anything sent in the clear is vulnerable to eavesdropping and tampering, whether or not the destination IPv4 address appears to be under your control.
Steve Wozniak, your time is up: Incompetence is not enough
The most obvious pleiotrope that I can think of associated with startups (possibly all businesses) is that CEOs tend to be, putting it bluntly, jerks.

The same qualities that make for a successful CEO -- ruthlessness, tenacity, the ability to play fast-and-loose with the facts when necessary -- also make for the kind of person you don't want to hang around with much. The better CEOs I've seen are able to compartmentalize this ability: they can be likeable, loyal friends, and restrict their ruthlessness to their business relationships. In the close-knit startup world, where the lines between business partners and friends blur, this is less practical.

I'm not saying I would change this -- I need a CEO who is ruthless -- but the side-effects are unfortunate.
Sorry, that should read "the original Yahoo valuation..."
Dear Flash plugin and Adobe,

Fuck you.
Still, sad to see the once-great China, who gave us paper, movable type, gunpowder, the compass, and too many other world-changing inventions to name here, devolving into a dystopian nation of bean-counting surveillance monkeys. A great society (and I am not implying that America and the West are "great" in this sense) does not police private communications between adults in order to detect the use of lewd or subversive words...period. Such behavior is symptomatic of a system of government that is rotten to its core.
There's been a gold bubble for centuries, actually. The damn stuff isn't nearly as useful as the price would imply.