skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agree with Jacques (and others) who reject the "if you have nothing to hide..." mantra.

I was asking specifically for cases where laws were created making behavior that was law-abiding at the time retroactively criminal.
If your project depends on saving $500 on a computer (the one thing you really need to do you job, as opposed to say a carpenter who needs $5000 in equipment just as a basis), is that project really worth doing?
I thought about this issue some time ago:

http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/109026/security-...

I agree that there's a distinction to be made between core/base and user-applications/ports (as mentioned elsewhere in this thread)...

Ultimately it's all softare, and the only distinction is fuzzy: e.g. the kernel won't easily break backwards compatibility, while databases, interpreters, etc. will... but it's not something you can easily measure without being vigilant for every change.

I think that an important distinction (at least for Ubuntu) are the main and universe repositories: I'd expect these problems to happen in universe and to be mostly absent in main.

From this point of view, a good choice would be to completely rely on main, and to weights pro and cons when deciding if using the repositories to manage your user applications/libraries/dependencies for your actual service. (I'd probably define all of them with Nix, but that's not a panacea)

The problem is that even main is guaranteed to keep up with all the security updates: In some cases updates aren't prepared and shipped because the default configuration is not vulnerable (but obviously a sysadmin could change that) and it's not worth the effort.. or just like in the Python2.7.9 case: A security update most often can be applied as a standalone patch, but if the changes are overarching and not easily distilled into a patch, the update will be too expensive/risky and won't be done.
In this video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJ4TJ4-kkDw ) they talk about the usage for underground buildings. It could be for underground buildings what the lift is for high buildings (eg make it practical).

This was on Product Hunt a while ago: https://www.producthunt.com/tech/coelux
Just as a heads up Cloudfront does compress on its own if you set it to. It's super helpful when you have less control over the origin.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/Developer...
Safe and Cheap Survival Retreats: Survive for the Fittest
Most HAMs know about the dangers of microwave exposure. If it really is an issue I'd expect vision problems first since your eyes are most sensitive.
>Government's spending is extremely dubious.

The ROI on Government research is orders of magnitude over what ever you think Google is getting in return.
The US government funds more research than all of SV put together even if at much smaller funding, the USG also funds the research that no corporation would fund them selves as there is literally no way to capitalize it.
I know that smack talking the government is fun but unless you want to go back to the dark ages never say that Google can fund research better.
I'm sorry for the rant, it's a bit off topic and not called for, but would like to say my experience is sort of the opposite:

I've been a Slackware-current user for most of a decade, and I love that it's so easy to upgrade the OS using slackpkg. I can (and do) often only upgrade a subset of packages, and never even need to reboot afterwards, not even after replacing the kernel (although, obviously...). A simple package system without dependency tracking has had many advantages for me. But installing stuff not in the standard system is more of a pain; there are third party repos but no where near as convenient as Debian/Ubuntu. I compile a couple SlackBuilds (packages) per week. I admit I've spent a huge amount of time learning how to do things like that manually and wouldn't recommend Slackware to those who won't want to learn sysadmin.

On the other hand my experience with upgrading between Ubuntu releases is terrible. A number of things have broken, permanently, every time, and I can't trivially upgrade from Ubuntu 14.10, because they purposefully break the package manager in old releases by breaking URLs. Also other pain points, like it not allowing installing both 32 and 64 bit devel libraries. I need those! The package manager is too complex and clever for me. (Honestly, I don't want to spend time learning how to override it.)
I'm planning to format the drive and reinstall from scratch because it seems easier than fixing it.
You can almost hear the Guardian's business leader writers rubbing their hands at the prospect. Which is as shameful and shortsighted as it is atypical for the Guardian. I would guess the team behind this article are acutely aware of the rate their owners are burning through cash and are anticipating massive layoffs soon. Perhaps they're looking for a lifeboat with the Apple-despising Financial Times?
Fedora isn't for non technical family members. Here's a bit of mild whinging that's only relevant if you want to give it to non-technical people.

There's a move to give stuff generic names, rather than the obscure names they had in the past. For example, Nautilus has been renamed to Gnome Files, or just Files. When a non technical person needs to search for hep this new name makes it impossible for them to create a useful search term.

[files foo bar] is going to be different from [nautilus foo bar]. Frustratingly the old name works for searching, but it's not in any titlebars or about boxes or menu items, so the non-technical person has to just know that files is also sometimes called Nautilus.

Fedora 20 has an appstore. This has something like 4 different names - in the menu, in the title bar, in the about box, in the icon.

For what it is (a rapidly released testing distro) it's lovely - nice community (from what I could tell) and lots of activity.
Other commenters have already mentioned that recursion is often a more natural fit for "recursively-defined" structures like trees. Here's an example using nothing more exotic than integers.

Suppose you want to compute the greatest common divisor of two non-negative integers. There's a famous algorithm that goes all the way back to Euclid's Elements, which you can write iteratively like this:

def gcd(a,b):
if a<b: a,b = b,a
while b != 0:
a,b = b,a%b
return a

That's pretty nice, and it's the way I would usually implement it. But in terms of readability I think the following is better:

def gcd(a,b):
if a<b: return gcd(b,a)
if b==0: return a
return gcd(b, a%b)

because it makes it explicit that the point is that at every point in the computation you're replacing gcd(a,b) with gcd(a',b') in such a way that the calculation keeps getting easier.

It turns out that if the gcd of a,b is d then there are always integers x,y such that ax+by=d, and it's sometimes useful to compute x,y along with d. (For instance: if d=1 then you have ax=1 mod b, so this gives you an efficient way of computing reciprocals in modular arithmetic.)

Here's how that goes, iteratively and then recursively. (I notice that I've used two extra state variables for the iterative version. That's what seems like the most natural approach. I'm not sure whether there's a convenient way to use only two.)

def xgcd(a,b):
p,q,r,s = 1,0,0,1 # a = p.a0+q.b0, b = r.a0+s.b0
if a<b: a,b, p,q, r,s = b,a, r,s, p,q
while b != 0:
k = a//b
a,b, p,q, r,s = b,a-k*b, r,s, p-k*r,q-k*s
return a,p,q

def xgcd(a,b):
if a<b:
d,x,y = xgcd(b,a)
return d,y,x
if b==0: return a,1,0
k = a//b
d,x,y = xgcd(b,a-k*b) # d = x.b + y.(a-kb)
return d,y,x-k*y

The difference isn't dramatic in any of these cases, but I think the recursive versions are clearer because the code is closer to the underlying mathematical theorems -- e.g., gcd(a,b) = gcd(b, a mod b) -- that make it work.

[EDITED to add:] Perhaps it's useful to think of it this way. If you wanted to explain how, say, that iterative xgcd function works, you'd do it with a loop invariant; in fact, I actually wrote one, in that first comment "explaining" what p,q,r,s signify. (In real code I would be more verbose about it.) The recursive function gets the same idea across in the language itself: each iteration of the loop becomes a call to xgcd, and the loop invariant becomes the fact that the corresponding call to xgcd actually computes what it's supposed to compute.
Problematic Patterns When Building Alongside a Monolith
I really don't know why you take what was an entirely positive comment, in praise of programming and programmers in the early 80s, and try to turn it into a negative, pointless, opinion-based pissing contest about which era was 'better'.
Do you have some example? I can't really picture the series of constraints that you mentioned...
Vision API – Image Content Analysis – Google Cloud Platform
Fedora's latest release rocks. Fedora used to have stability issues here or there because it's the cutting-edge version of RHEL, but I think it's unlikely you'd run into those in everyday usage with mainstream hardware. It shouldn't be less stable than Ubuntu.
I used to use Fedora with KDE 5 or so years ago. I liked it fine. The only think I lacked was the convenience of deb packages since so many projects offer debs, and using alien to install debs with yum was painful (they've changed package managers now, if I'm not mistaken).

Probably, if I move away from the convenience of a Debian derivative these days, it will be to FreeBSD.
Well the labels are unimportant. The point is that certain elements of advertising/marketing seem reasonable and it could be argued that they are value adding to consumers as well as the advertisers, while others are manipulative and outright unethical.
Research shows meditation boosts your health, happiness and success
Private and Hybrid Cloud Adoption Continues to Climb
Hmm; I'm puzzled by a contradiction between this and another recent article. From this article we learn that we shouldn't do this:

"Secondly, they are mixing their own binary packages with binary packages from Debian and Ubuntu without rebuilding the latter. This creates something that we in Debian call a "FrankenDebian" which results in system updates becoming unpredictable <https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian#Don.27t_make_a_Frank.... With the result, that the Mint developers simply decided to blacklist certain packages from upgrades by default thus putting their users at risk because important security updates may not be installed."

while from <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11131081>:

"Nobody else requires that you rebuild every package before you can redistribute it in a modified distribution - such a restriction is a violation of freedom 2 of the Free Software Definition, and as a result the binary distributions of Ubuntu are not free software."

I appreciate that the latter one is discussing a hard requirement as a result of Canonical's IP licensing. But the former seems to indicate that it would be bad practice to just copy all of Ubuntu's (or Debian's) binary packages and build a new derivative distribution on top of it. Is the latter piece arguing in part for a freedom that would be a really bad idea in practice?
Avopix: More than 15 000 absolutely free photos under Public Domain licence
> but that's 2 bits of data

As if brains store bits.
Oh god not this again...
Accepting poor security practices from the Linux mint developers cannot be justified just because you are not paying anything.

Open source projects need to be held to the very highest security standards.

How these security breaches are handled today set a precedent for how such security breaches are handled in the future. So it's a good idea to learn and improve from such security breaches and set a positive precedent.
The linked page is actually a comment on an LWN article with that title. Changing the submission title to that wouldn't reflect the content being highlighted here.
I remember Arnold Schwarzenegger having a fight with a self-driving car in Total Recall. Further back we have 2001 and the entire canon of Asimov's three laws stories of computerized morality and how it might be exploited or debugged. And the Paranoia RPG.

However, in the successful real semi-automated totalitarianism of China, the secret to keeping the system running is the avoidance of overt confrontations like this. In the future, if your self-driving car doesn't want you to go somewhere, it'll just refuse to understand the address. Or take you somewhere unrelated. Or use whatever the standard euphemism for "that's not allowed, but we're not allowed to say it's not allowed" that polite people use.
As an American, I find this attitude disturbing as well. It's like there's a cultural repulsion to talking about anything of consequence. And we wonder why US politics is in the state that it's in...
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/27/a-is-not-a-it-se...
It's user friendly, yes, but also reckless. The distro won't "work" any more if it gets sued into oblivion by Oracle, Adobe, Nvidia, AMD and whoever else feels like kicking puppies.
Qubit raises $40m in Goldman Sachs led series C
Signals of an unsustainable future coming from Davos
My knowlege of FreeBSD is limited, but from what I understand this still does not resolve the issue.

While they have seperated the base OS, they have not resolve the issues of applications that can be mission critical, thus warrant to be frozen like the base os is. Things like apache, mysql, etc etc etc.

If you treat them like user apps then they will be updated when maybe I did not want them to be, but if you treat them like base os then you have the problem the author outlines.

Fruther my understanding is the ports system only supports the lastest version of FreeBSD, meaning if you want to use ports you always have to update to the latest version when released.

I have CentOS and RHEL Servers running version 5, if it were FreeBSD I would not be able to use this 2 release old version of FreeBSD and ports, I would have to upgrade.
In Italy many people refer to mobiles as telefonino (lil' phone). I guess that doesn't really apply to phablets though :)
Germany as well. I always heard it dates back to an early marketing thing.

There's also the old (~1990s) joke that it's actually Bavarian and short for "Hän die ken Schnür?" ("Haben die kein Kabel?" / "Do these not have a cord?").
They provide gpg signed sha hashes, it's apparently just not documented:

https://micahflee.com/2016/02/backdoored-linux-mint-and-the-...
Manjaro, really? The one distribution with a worse security track record than Mint? "Our SSL certificate expired, please change your computer clocks one year back" Manjaro?
> "ok, US users can't get this, but everyone else can"

Setting aside for a minute that this isn't possible, it's like saying you won't release your app on iOS because of Apple's walled gardens. Sure, the walls suck, but the users inside are numerous and spend lots of money. Most product creators don't have the option to exclude US users.
In fairness, what else could they have done, given the time constraints? They even hired support staff to make sure he got fed! They surely didn't have source control or other systems to make it safe/easy for multiple programmers to work on it together. I imagine the code is some monolithic thing full of complicated Atari hacks that's best managed by being all together in one person'd mind.

Perhaps they could have made two games in parallel so if one failed, they'd still have a spare.
It is a really interesting way of looking at it.

I don't know if there is any kind of concept like "long present" for people that does have a hard time forgetting things. I will be one of the "short present" guys for whom what happened this morning is a long time ago. :)

My friend is always correcting me when I say, some time ago when he recalls perfectly that it was two days ago. I guess that two days ago is part of his "present" while it is just part of my "past".

At the beginning I was trying to ask him to forget about that issues, that only was making him unhappy. But I was able to see that it was a different way of perceiving things. Do you have found any way of moving things faster to the past? Or you are not able or don't want to do it? It will be also interesting to know how much people can control this. I have seen a lot of techniques to try to remember more, but not so much to try to remember less.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law
You could argue that grandparent's criticism was presented as the more objective 'poorly written', which suggests a lack of skill on the author's part. Whereas the parent seems to address the style of writing, which is more subjective and less demanding of citation.
The United States has a very poor attitude when it comes to education. Teachers are "paid too much", "work too little", etc... Yet without a strong foundation rooted in education we will see more or more individuals receiving sub-par experiences in school.

The counter-argument to this is that trade schools and apprenticeships are producing more hands-on training than the traditional educational model that the U.S. delivers. You start seeing speciality "schools" crop up with a focus on the "career" rather than an "education" (which I relate to being a broad / generalized introduction to topics / concepts and how they can be used).

Is there a perfect solution? Couldn't tell you; I'm the wrong person to ask (ex-teacher now working as a Linux SysAdmin). But there IS a problem and one we need to address as a nation if we want to remain competitive across all fields on a global scale.
You can use gpg on windows or macosx as well to verify the signed hashes.

As linked in the blog post in my other comment, tails explains things quite well:

https://tails.boum.org/download/index.en.html#verify
Maybe no one wrote it. The Graun's stock in trade hit piece editorial is so thoroughly predictable by now they probably have a perl script to churn them out.
Most people install some packages as soon as they install an OS. A distro could be very nearly as user-friendly by creating a wizard that takes users through the steps of installing these proprietary things in a legal way.
> For example, they always terminate.

How do you terminate?

for(;;) {
}
Hmm, why would they be. Mint already offers a special version for people living in countries where they can be sued for installing a video decoder or a video driver - it's called a "No codecs" version and it's meant for users in USA and Japan.

Suing in the rest of the world would be a rather wasted effort right now.
5 Steps to Making Better Sales Decisions
My cat is totally mesmerized by the "Intense Focus" stream.
He's laying here in an absolute trance state .. haven't seen him like this..
He enjoys music a lot and often sits near the speaker and listens to music, but this stream seems to be doing something to him, because he's really tripped out :).

I also enjoy it , so you've definitely have something there.

Great stuff ! I'd really like a mac app though - maybe it's just me, but I really dislike listening to music from the browser - I like my music app to be distinct and accessible from the OS.

@Adam from Brain.fm: I could give a helping hand with the Mac app if you're interested ?
Is there a way for me to get the Mint Cinnamon experience with Ubuntu under the hood?

The last time I tried I couldn't get it to work in a painless/reliable way.
> Fork the repo

> Clone your fork

> Create a branch

That sounds like a reasonable alternative to email...
Caterpillar's new smartphone with built-in thermal imaging
If Mint is just really a GUI interface, do they really need to put out a whole new distribution? Why not focus on the GUI and let the distros do the distribution?
Hm, I am not bored yet, but I think I might be bored in the future. So I was wondering if I should go back to university and study something interesting, Physics perhaps, or even pursue a new career, like becoming an airline pilot or so..
How do you define music, then?
I don't want to be a downer, but devops is definitely NOT just a new name for being a sysadmin. We've actively recruited for people who are not old fashioned jump-on-a-box-and-make-hot-changes sysadmins. They need to understand automated infrastructure and deployment through code, so it's not a small niche to just pick up easily. If it was that easy, everyone would be doing it and it wouldn't pay so well.
Yik Yak vs. Jodel: An interesting race begins
I absolutely love the concept of NixOS, but I haven't tried it out. Is it well-supported enough to use day-to-day as a developer? Do you often have to build things from source?
Except it has a touchpad which is a much more important similarity.
I never got what the problem with recursion in CS101 might be.

In Portuguese universities, by time you get to this programming issues you already had enough maths to be able to relate recursion to how mathematical proofs work.

At least it was so for me and most of my friends back in the 90's.
https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Between.html

Which is particularly useful for symbolically representing queries for entities.

EntityClass["Element", "AtomicNumber" -> Between[{2, 3}]]
I have no actual evidence for this, but I think it's reasonable to believe that within 10 years about 95% of enterprise software will run in a browser. There'll still be niches where it isn't the case (CAD being an example) but for everything else, it's web technologies all the way down.
The first paragraph in the article says: 'Fertility experts are warning man that using a mobile for as little as an hour a day is "cooking sperm" and lowering level significantly.'

Assuming for the sake of argument that the findings of this research are actually correct, it seems to me that using your mobile phone more would reduce the sperm-cooking effect, because most ways of actually using a mobile phone don't involve holding it near your groin.

The reported effect is large enough that I strongly suspect it's (1) just wrong or (2) actually caused by some other thing that happens to correlate with mobile phone use. The Telegraph article doesn't seem to provide a link to the actual study, so it's hard to tell.

I notice that they say "The team monitored more than 100 men attending a fertility clinic for a year" -- it's hard to see how any study based only on looking at men who are having trouble conceiving could actually provide the information the Telegraph is suggesting this one does.
That's not a claim that will meet much opposition.

However, to claim that marketing is inherently "manipulative", or that manipulative tactics are even a significant part of it, seems a little ill-informed.

Y Combinator's motto is "Make something people want". To the overwhelming majority of practitioners, this is exactly what marketing sets out to do.