skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I had become tired of the dearth of issues that crop up to maintain an Arch desktop distribution.

I'm glad to hear this "out there." I've run Linux on the desktop for 20 years now, and just concluded, as of today, that I was done forever. It was my main OS at home AND work for probably 15 of those years. I've done many years each with Slack, RedHat, SuSE, Gentoo, and Ubuntu. I know them all very well. When I ran them on my desktop, I was running them on all my servers too, and getting both sides.

With all the kerfuffle, I decided to reboot out of my work-from-home Visual Studio gig into my Ubuntu install yesterday, and I did the apt-get update and upgrade bit, and then COULD NOT LOG IN. (It would think about it, then kick me back to the lightdm login screen.) Simple reading of the logs showed me that the nVidia kernel module was out of whack. For about an hour I purged the packages and tried reinstalling. I tried the x-edgers PPA packages. Then I remembered that I had had this sort of trouble before, and had concluded that Ubuntu's graphical "restricted hardware" driver-installer widget does things outside of the normal package management, and decided that I didn't care any more. I scraped the whole thing off my machine.

But I couldn't just NOT HAVE a Linux installation, so, today, against my better judgement, I installed Fedora. Within 5 minutes -- FIVE MINUTES -- of trying to install software, I had 2 SELinux error messages. Why in the world would installing native packages cause SELinux errors? And trying to install the Chrome browser RPM gave me some cryptic Gnome library error. I decided that was enough of THAT too.

I've fought this kind of stuff for a couple of decades. I was using Linux when getting it going required asking for advice from the most pretentious jerks on the internet -- #linux on EFNet -- because the "internet" wasn't big enough to have a lot of documentation about it yet. I've learned the ins and outs of RPM, apt, and portage. I'm just done. I have enough trouble with Windows, and Linux is at least 2 orders of magnitude worse. (I'm typing this on OS X, which an order of magnitude better than Windows.)

I BRIEFLY considered trying Arch, since that seems to be the only other viable alternative for Linux besides Ubuntu or Fedora, but my experience with Gentoo leads me to think that, like you say, it's just going to be a hassle. Even more of a hassle than either Ubuntu or Fedora, and I'm already DONE with them. So I guess that's that. Linux will be ready for the desktop just in time for everyone to stop running desktops in favor of tablets, phones, and -- according to Cringley, recently -- gaming machines in the cloud.

If handing my activity stream to Microsoft and Apple is the price to NOT have to faff about with tweaking package management systems, then I guess I'll pay. As Murdoch said, in the Lethal Weapon movies, "I'm too old for this st."
According to this[1], it'll likely be litigated in your state of residence regardless of where your former employer is located.

[1] http://www.crn.com/news/storage/217201071/emc-former-employe...
It was explained to me this way: in the US executive boards are unevenly weighted toward CO interests. In countries where wage experts and workers are more likely to sit on boards the ratio isn't absurd because boards are less likely to vote for higher executive wages (Japan and Europe have reasonable CEO wages).
> Well, they're passing the risk on

Yes, but PayPal gets a (high) transaction fee in exchange for assuming that risk. The company borrowing from PayPal is charged interest for the privilege of taking that risk away from PayPal. That's insanely exploitative on PayPal's part.
There is value in a non-dividend paying stock beyond the stock market itself: ideally, the market cap estimates the value of the company if it were to be acquired, and someone buys your shares from you. So it's not simply stock market participants guessing about other stock market participants. There is an actual, valuable, buyable product being traded, namely the company itself; it just happens to be traded in the form of lots of tiny shares.

Whether the chance of an acquisition happening is sufficiently non-nil as to be worth caring about is a legitimate question. It's not completely unheard of even for tech companies (cf. Dell), but it's certainly not the norm.

Also, note that the stock market isn't zero-sum: when the value of a stock goes up, wealth is created. Nothing goes down. If a company IPOs at $10/share, I buy it at $12, and that share gets purchased for $14, nobody loses money. The original purchaser of the share made $2, I made $2, and the final owner now owns a product which the market thinks is worth paying $14 for. There may be another sense in which this activity is meaningless, but it's not because it's zero-sum.
I'm sorry, but I think this perspective is fairly naive and ignores the reality of how applied science and engineering work in universities today. You're talking about 17th century scientists, but the reality is that in the middle of the 20th century there was a tremendous shift to applied sciences -- computer science being one of those fields -- with the goal of producing useful innovations.

The whole point of my blog post is this: Most academics are trying to do work that is relevant to industry, but many of them are going about it the wrong way. Nobody is saying you have to work on industry-relevant research, but if you're going to try, at least do it right.
Why can't you be collaborative for mutual benefit?
Are you referring to the comment -

> The real, big risk is not using a password hash at all, and instead using "salted hashes".

If so, your statement is incorrect. Without salting you are vulnerable to trivial rainbow table attacks [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_table
The interview startup space has become very interesting. Educative.io is bringing a new approach to prepare for interviews or any topic for that matter. The visual aid and easy navigation does the trick for me.

Kudos to the team!
This guy lyrically killed this Tupac Classic
The difference is that today, we know these chemicals and pollutants to be harmful, and yet we still allow them to be produced on an increasing scale.

Mercury, arsenic, lead, natural bacteria and fungi - we didn't know these were bad when they were prevalent killers - as you point out yourself, we even thought they had medicinal properties in some cases. Nobody is going to go around today sprinkling PFOA in their daily oatmeal for its purported medicinal properties, but they might get their ground springs poisoned as the result of known and accepted runoff from a nearby plant.

The environmental poisoning of today is the result of negligence and fraud rather than ignorance.
I'm not a lawyer, but I have a handful of patents, and have been involved in the question of whether something is infringing on a patent or not. What I've heard from patent lawyers is that obviousness can be very difficult to argue. Taking two patented things and combining them is kind of the gold standard for obviousness. From there, it gets more difficult and murky.
Cutting the research budget only makes academia more cutthroat and exploitative. We need to fundamentally get rid of the pyramidal academic job structure.
Terminal Master's degrees are profit centres for American universities, not something on the straight and narrow track to a Ph.D. As such the entry requirements are lower than for getting into a Ph.D. programme.
I take it that you coined this term all by yourself? This is the only use of "instigative hobby" that google knows about. I think you need a better adjective than instigative. Nothing about instigative makes me think the distinction is between the consumption/creation of goods. I don't agree with your conclusion but at the very least "creative hobby" seems like the obvious choice. I am not sure why I can more easily teach and talk about woodworking to someone than I could if the subject was video games or wine. This certainly does not match up with my experience with my hobby of book consumption or the experiences of my friend who is a wine sommelier. But most importantly I am not sure why I would prefer the creation of relationships where the dynamic is based on a knowledge asymmetry in my favor.
Yes, the PDP-11 instruction set makes null-terminated strings especially efficient. Strcpy() is 3 instructions per character, for example.

The PDP-11 features that make this possible are (1) post increment addressing and (2) MOVE instructions set the condition codes.
No, I mean incorrect assumptions. It doesn't matter if we're talking research in industry or academia; doing research based on flawed (not simplifying) assumptions is bad science.
You're always welcome to consult a lawyer, but odds are there won't be much you can do. It's not uncommon to wipe out common shareholders where the preferred stock and other debtholders take all the money out of the acquisition.

It's also difficult to weigh in without knowing the specifics, and even then the specifics from your perspective might be very different from the perspective or facts the board is running with.

I realize the director receiving 1 million may seem unfair (and it may even BE unfair), but it might also be whatever his/her agreement is with the company.
Since integrating shutup.css [0] in my browsers, my experience on websites with comments sections has been much more pleasurable. It's very good at recognizing comments sections and completely removing them.

I wish more sites disabled them and instead opened their blogs up to well-thought out letters to the editor.

[0]https://stevenf.com/shutupcss/
Which the user will promptly reset to the same password they use everywhere else, meeting whatever entropy requirements are in place.
Changelogs as a Service, eh? The idea definitely has potential!

Somehow I've signed myself up for a bunch of newsletters from various companies whose services I don't even use that update me on new features they've implemented in addition to blogs from their employees. It's an interesting read from time to time so I haven't unsubscribed.

If you can provide a service which can guide other people through publishing the same type of useful/interesting/insightful information regardless of the size/scope/nature of their project/research/work/business/hobby...

This idea is actually really exciting the more I think about it. Keep at it!

But the landing page needs more information, yes.
"Vexilla regis proedunt inferni...."
Why do you think having different APIs (qt, gtk mainly) had much to with the fact that a lot of people don't use Linux for desktop?

If you're talking about binary compatibility, that's an issue for closed-source shops. With static linking, that isn't an issue that you can't workaround either actually (there are many closed-source programs for Linux such as thousands of Steam games). Distros will never put their binary blobs in the repositories, but companies still can (and do) publish .deb/.rpms (and third-party repos in some cases) for their programs.

Binary compatibility is an issue nevertheless, of course. But it is an issue that FOSS distros consciously don't care about, mostly because binary blobs taint a FOSS environment and stand against the underlying philosophy of FOSS.

It's not because Win32 is a superior API that games and big software titles are Windows only. For decades, people were force-fed Windows when they bought a computer, and they became a monopoly, much of it thanks to the deal they cut with IBM. It wasn't like people chose Windows. And Windows kept many big companies from making Mac/Linux ports with behind-the-door deals.

And Android didn't end up dominating the desktop either. Smartphone-land is a totally different and distinct user base. And the fact that it dominated over iPhone doesn't have anything to do with the API either.
Just like it's not fair for me to conflate all of academia together in my post, it's difficult to lump all of industry together. Places like Google have a pretty good track record of leveraging the latest innovations from academia when it makes sense to do so. Not all companies work this way. You need people who are aware of the research, and willing to put the extra effort in to make it practical.
> Here's a very recent example of this system at work: Chromium sneaks a binary blob which secretly listens to your microphone and sends data to Google: https://lwn.net/Articles/648392/

Downloading a binary blob in the first place was the real issue. However, the voice recognition module wasn't actually used unless you opted into the "Ok Google" hotword feature.

Getting back on topic, Android handles similar problems in a different way, via the permission system (esp. the improvements in Android 6.0+).
Interesting to see many type safe functional languages compiling to javascript. Elm is another such project being a haskell-like type safe language which compiles to JS/HTML/CSS.
To be fair, it also sounds like an unfair comparison. A century vs a decade. And how many duplicates in the out of copyright works? The public doesn't really benefit from 100 different editions of Sherlock Holmes's early adventures that differ only in how the cover is rendered and whether the "publisher" charges 99 cents or a 1.03 dollars.

Edit: Oops, late 1800s vs 1990s is not add unbalanced as a century vs a decade. The dupes are still a big issue if he didn't handle those.
There's always more work to be done. If you're competent whatsoever, you'll be asked to tackle any unforeseen tasks.

Don't underrate "easy to get along with, get's things done".
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What tool do you use for mounting remote file system on Mac?
I have been using sshfs for a long time, but it got some bugs, it is not working properly on Mac OSX 10.11. I guess many need to mount a file system to do proper web app development on a remote or local vm server. I'm just curious which other alternatives there are compared to sshfs on Mac?
>Most academics are trying to do work that is relevant to industry,

That is certainly not what most academics think.
It already makes me feel a bit old to remember the days when Gilt, Fab, LivingSocial, and Groupon were all riding hot as variants of discount deals and but one by one have fallen from grace.
You can also see h5py maintainer Andrew Collette's response here: https://gist.github.com/rossant/7b4704e8caeb8f173084#gistcom...
I'm not sure which is more embarrassing: today's ludicrous copyright terms that automatically lock away culture from all of us for potentially over a century, or the fact that legislation that spans centuries can be bought for a mere $149,612. The article claims Trent Lot got a piddling $1,000 (well, publicly at least) for getting on board. That's less money than Disney generates for itself per second of its existence.
Seriously? That's amazing.
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You can run Puppet in a decentralised way:

sudo puppet apply --verbose --debug --modulepath=./system system.pp

You can also use BASH/Python whatever with Puppet and still take advantage of Puppet's declarative semantics if that's what you need:

exec { "install_node":
require => Package[["build-essential", "openssl", "libssl-dev", "pkg-config"]],
command => "${settings::modulepath}/main/install_node.sh v0.12.7",
creates => "/usr/local/bin/node",
logoutput => true,
timeout => 1800
}
Ah, I see what you meant now. Scoping ambiguity of "this" :)
I didn't realise how ubiquitous it is until I went to a music festival, every phone that was held up recording a particular act was using Snapchat.
> That's not true that they come from the brightest people, I'd say that's very much a bias.

[Citation needed]

There are such things as talent, insight and experience but intelligence makes everything easier, from learning new fields and tools to evaluating and formulating new ideas. Ceteris Paribus more intelligence is better.
OS X only. What a pity. Also, has anyone reverse-engineered the file format yet?
I hate myself for laughing at his comics. Whatever Adams' other, numerous, faults, he does have an amazing economy with words.
Can't we say Google play store for android is like a package management system?
The corporate boards members tend to be CEOs of other companies so they have a tendency to give each other raises because it is in their best interest.
Sadly I don't think your cynicism is misplaced. I'm just back from a trip to Washington where the advice we got was essentially setup an industry group and hire a lobbyist. Am curious to see if it makes things easier.
> However, the voice recognition module wasn't actually used unless you opted into the "Ok Google" hotword feature.

So says someone, but you don't know what else the binary blob (which can be "updated" at the will of Google, without asking anything to the user) does for sure, do you? If you're content with that explanation, you're essentially taking their word for it with blind trust. For example, will it push a new binary and/or suddenly start listening to you or send certain files from your computer if someone three-letter government agency tells Google to do so? Would you bet your life on it?

Trust in software may not be that serious for you, but there are people out there whose lives depend on it.

The issue here is twofold, and in terms of security, it being a binary blob is the lesser one: 1) this is a binary blob which hasn't been vetted by the eyeballs of FOSS world 2) Google circumvents the package manager (along with package reviewers and FOSS community) and secretly and freely installs (and updates) a binary blob on your system, which is essentially a closed-source backdoor singularly controlled by a US company.

A program that silently pushes programs on users' systems (and silently executes them!) at the pleasure of a company never had any place in Debian or any distro with similar principles. It wouldn't matter if they pushed the source code and compiled it on your system (in fact, some rootkits work just like that).

> Getting back on topic, Android handles similar problems in a different way, via the permission system (esp. the improvements in Android 6.0+).

You're talking about a totally different problem/class of permissions here though (accessing network/video/audio/filesystem etc vs ability to install packages as a non-root user).
Rather than demonstrating that you are profiting from the work (which seems a low bar to clear), a sliding scale might be a better middle ground. Something like (years for illustration only; personally I'd probably go for shorter terms):

- 0-20 years post publication - free, automatic protection (i.e. basically what we have now)

- 20-30 years post publication - nominal fee and continuous (yearly?) registration required to maintain protection (to prove active use/interest)

- 30-40 years post publication - large-ish fee and registration required (most works would probably be 'abandoned' to public domain here unless continuing to be commercially successful or backed by a large corp.)

- 40+ years post publication - increasing fee each year indefinitely. Disney et al. can keep major works protected if they wish, but most works will enter the public domain
This sounds like the classic Postgres problems on large, insert-only tables. The default settings for statistics gathering just aren't tuned for tables like this. Now, normally the problem is not full table scans, but using extremely inefficient join strategies, but chances are it's the same problem.

The typical solution is to modify the autovacuum settings for that table to recalculate the statistics a lot more often, and maybe even with much higher resolution, depending on your case.

You can also convince it that indices are the way to go by changing more basic settings about costs of reading a random page on disk vs reading sequentially, making full table scans more expensive, but tuning those settings away from realistic costs might have negative side effects for you.

I was able to have great success running complex queries on 100M+ row tables that were insert-only using this kind of trick, but YMMV. If nothing else fails, really experienced people are more than willing to help in the performance mailing list. They sure helped me quite a few times.
the implied analogy doesn't really seem applicable here. What are you trying to say?
Fight the good fight:

https://fairemploymentalliance.org
It's just XML IIRC.
I have accounts on the 3 main providers Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail. Which gives me the most trouble? Yahoo Mail.

When Mayer became CEO she told employees to start using Yahoo Mail. I wonder how many are actually doing so. I would think if they were actually using it the product would now have less glitches.
I've followed his site for awhile, and he seems like a thoughtful person who likes to document his reasoning. I'm not a sysadmin, so I don't care about a lot of what he writes, but he's worth reading for stuff I care about. For example, he's pretty astute about the "how" and "why" of spam.
It's all about lowering the stakes in social interaction. It's one of the reasons why Twitter became so popular yet people continue to be baffled by it. Facebook has utterly failed on this front IMO.

Most people realize that whatever they want to say to their friends is almost always unimportant and ultimately meaningless. This is how real life conversations work 99% of the time. When you post something to Facebook you're saying that whatever you have to say is important enough to put up on everybody's news feed and stay around forever. When you use Snapchat you're saying that whatever you have to say is worth a few seconds of your friends' time and then disappears forever.

It also plays against the slow realization by Millennials as they've grown up that everything they do on the Internet is permanent and they need to be careful about it. Snapchat let's you do whatever stupid shit you want as long as you trust the recipients to not save it and share it.
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How the heck did this spam get any votes?
$75k in which part of the country though. It's a very arbitrary number if we don't establish the location.
The CTA (organizers of CES) aren't going to do a thing unless they are served a court order. No way they want to get into the business of arbitrating IP disputes between their thousands of exhibitors!
To give more consideration to that argument than it's worth for a second, is there no government funded medical research into these medical issues in the US then?

Add to the fact that you'd be talking about prevention, not cure for it to be a parallel to the gun issue.

Shame that no government can try to do something about more than one issue at once, though. Imagine what it would be like if we could keep dangerous drivers off the streets, give those with mental illness the treatment they deserve, conduct medical research into preventing and curing life threatening illnessess, and stop deadly weapons from getting into the hands of those who would use them to harm others, but all at the same time!
But isn't that true for any law? Fraud and theft can only be prevented or the perpetrators punished by armed state actors (policemen). That does not mean the entire judicial system is violent.

In fact, this usage of the term 'violence' is confusing and likely incorrect. The same reasoning can be used to say stuff like 'Law is violence. Freedom is violence. Business is violence.' Since each of those are run by laws enforced by policemen and armed federal agents.
Out of curiosity, how would this be different from a blog?
Presumably, lobbying is cheap if there's nobody tugging in the opposite direction. $1000 would convince pretty much anyone to vote a certain way on an issue they're neutral/undecided on. On the other hand, $1000 probably won't "buy back" a vote that e.g. the oil lobby bought for $1mm.
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