skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Chromium is not packaged using debs in Ubuntu. Firefox is the default supported browser, as it has been for many years, and that works perfectly fine as a deb.

The reason the Chromium deb package pulls in a snap is so that users upgrading from 18.04 or 19.10 continue to get a working Chromium. If you have disabled snaps, then apt will not pull in the Chromium snap.

> That is absolutely forcing snap on people, since Chromium was a standard .dep package in the previous release.

It really isn't. The default web browser works fine and isn't a snap. Chromium has never been installed by default on Ubuntu.
Reading this article it’s almost as if Graeber never looked at the world around him and saw how people behave when they see that law and order has broken down e.g. the London riots of 2010 where everyone ran to loot the nearest Foot Locker as soon as they realised no one would stop them.
No. The technology is not there anymore. Unless you consider “minor and unimportant” the network news (it’s barren today), ftp servers (they are unsupported by web browsers), gopher (unsupported too), or the muds (barren too).
You seem functionally fixed cognitively.

Sorry, anarchy is fire and brimstone! Mad Max living! Let’s go there!

Does that feel better?

Anarchism isn’t a thing. It can’t have one shape, and color.

Like most things there’s nuance and philosophy to it that the popular memes, and a whole lot of popular writing, do not impart. Vague emotional colorings without functional concept.

Anarchism is fine with collective social norms so long as it’s not at gun point, serving 1% bottom lines.

There’s little to be said about logistical life, we know how to supply people. It’s emotional categorizing of who is lord and who is a serf that we’ve yet to shed.
The Snap Store is a Snap, yes. That's surely entirely unsurprising?
People really don't seem to think the working parent thing through. Unless there is a stay-at-home parent, commuting to an office does nothing to eliminate childcare-related disruptions of your work time. It just makes you completely dependent on institutional child care, regardless of the pandemic related risks to your family.

And what kind of lame company culture only allows the proles to come into contact with Very Important Senior Team Members via "fortuitous" in-person collisions? For God's sake, just Slack them.

IME in-person meetings are so overrated. They always end up at "yeah we should totally do these things" and nothing actually happens.

Honestly people, there is nothing you can do in an office culture that you can't do equally well in a remote culture, if you take the time to adapt. But the people who don't understand or care how to adapt will continue to propagate their urban legends about the unique magic of fortuitous shoulder taps, hallway collisions and lunch meetings. Whatever.
Unfortunately authority doesn't behave better in the presence of itself
People are very good at conflict resolution because third-party arbitration is available as a last resort. They aren't nearly as good at it in e.g. the average Third-World country, where fair and impartial courts are not generally available.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Yc2L5koWZY

Seems rather too loud.
I switched to Pop_OS precisely because it doesn't support snaps. Snap is arguably half-free : the server isn't free at all, no working free implementation exists. Therefore I don't want any snaps. Flatpak is OK.

This is all part of a sneaky attempt to get free software in control: Microsoft grabbing more and more power in the Linux Foundation, RMS ousted from the FSF, GitHub becoming more and more central as a default go-to-hosting (beware of Github!)...

All of these are part of a dangerous trend of appropriation and control by well-known monopolists. Don't fall for it. The GAFAM aren't nice guys.
Not only is myopic and US-centered, it's just plain non-factual, LiveJournal really took off pre-9/11. Around 2000-2001 literally everyone in my friend group were on LJ (except me), and not just passively/occasionally - regular active users and always talking about LJ stuff IRL. Even people who didn't have a computer at home! It seemed like it was just as much a social network as it was a publishing platform.

According to Wikipedia LiveJournal had to implement an invite-only system for new users because they were growing faster than the server architecture could handle. This was all started pre-9/11.

That being said, I didn't hear the word "blog" until the year 2003.

Beyond that I don't recall the Iraq War being a major blogging topic. Sure, everyone has an opinion on the Iraq War, but how many blog posts can the average person actually write about their feelings on the Iraq War? Can't be more than a few, not a topic that's going to keep the masses activity blogging.

To say blogging was a "shared response" to the invasion of Iraq is just... bizarre.
It honestly surprises me that the evolution of ergonomic keyboards has been so slow.
Sure, we have plenty of split keyboards now, but we don't have any commercially available DataHand-like designs [1]. Watch someone type with a DataHand you'll see that they barely need to move their fingers at all [2]!

The best similarly ergonomic designs we have at the moment are a gaming keypad [3] and some DYI projects [4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DataHand

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrRWTeJ0-Ow

[3] https://www.azeron.eu/

[4] https://github.com/JesusFreke/lalboard see also https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=41422.800

----

On another note, does anybody know how good steno keyboards tend to be for RSI issues in the long run?

I've practiced some steno with a regular keyboard (thanks to plover [5] and Typey Type [6]), but I'd need an actual steno keyboard to continue since I don't have N-key rollover on my current keyboard.

The Georgi [7] seems like a good option and I'd imagine that it would be pretty good for ergonomics since it's a split design and also rather small.
The only problem is that I'd have to learn steno which will likely take quite some time.

Here's a demo of someone writing code with a steno keyboard (54 keystrokes needed vs 143 if you were using QWERTY) [8].

[5] http://www.openstenoproject.org/plover/

[6] https://didoesdigital.com/typey-type/

[7] https://www.gboards.ca/product/georgi

[8] https://youtu.be/Wpv-Qb-dB6g?t=380
You're right. Though I'd probably argue that a lot of people may be overly concerned with discoverability, follower counts, monitization, etc. You can blog/podcast/make videos/etc. as easily (or more so) as you could in the early 2000s. And you can always just link from Twitter or whatever. If you don't stress about maximizing your followers all the capabilities are still there.

But you're right that the bias has shifted, e.g. long twitter threads (with no real archivability) vs. a blog post.
But families also suffer spousal abuse, child abuse, sexual abuse.

That in and of itself should make it clear that anarchism is a fairy tale.

Sure, I'm a good person that wants to do good by society, you probably are too. Nonetheless there are rapists.
I will say that half of these complaints are not valid. For example: Snap store navigation sucks? apt has no navigation at all. Chromium is a snap app? Compile from scratch or add an alternative apt repo.

The only real complaint I see here is that automatic updates don’t allow you to control them. That is a real shame but also isn’t inherent in the design of snaps so could be fixed.

Part of the problem is that making .deb packages is an arcane art. I wish it wasn’t. And dependency hell of “well this version of the distro comes with libxxx 1.1 and the other one has 1.0.7 and now I need to build multiple versions of the package just to make it work for 20.04 and 18.04” does suck.

I do love Debian as a platform and I don’t use snap, but I also use macOS as my desktop OS and guess how Chrome is packaged and installed there?
If you are going to use public commit profiles as part of your screening process and hiring decisions, I would encourage you to ask candidates what aspects of their public activity are relevant. For example, ask for a few specific highlights and why the candidate thinks those are interesting.

Hobby projects and open source contributions are evidence of patterns of collaboration and commits, but may not be indicative of one's typical (or best) work. There are also many reasons why a great software engineer may not have a public activity profile.

The majority of my public commits are scratching itches on open source projects, and are very opportunistic depending on other life and work commitments at the time. Code may not always be pristine, but I can probably rationalise why I took a certain approach (following existing code style, hacking for my own use, actually aiming for quality and performance, ...).

As a hiring manager, I'm also OK if candidates want to do something with their personal time that doesn't involve committing to public repos :).
Keyboardio Atreus only have one shift, one control and a tiny space-key and return-key.

Some positions that need shift/control in the left hand will be forced. Keyboards use two shift/control to alleviate the stress. Traditional typewriters have both for fast typing and a balance of force with both hands.
It's like a dance of fingers, using the shift with the opposite hand to the key being typed.

On top of that, there is a small "space key", in the right. Being space one of the most pressed keys,it put too much stress on that. traditional keyboards have a large space-key to help the hand position and press with the opposite hand to last key typed.

In an ergonomic keyboard the hand and forearm shall be aligned (that's done), but the keys shall help.
And SUSE/openSUSE for an alternative in the same segment.

Very similar roots, also RPM-based, but with a different take on things, such as using Btrfs and KDE by default, which I prefer.
As best as I can tell, this article simply has the effect backwards from what Mazur claims. Rather than counting too fast, the usual psychology studies show that the elderly count too slowly. Mazur cites Mangan et al (1996), which (seems to) claim:

When 15 healthy adults ages 50 to 80 counted seconds to estimate a time period of three minutes, they took 3.7 minutes on average, scientists at the Clinch Valley College of the University of Virginia at Wise reported recently at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

In contrast, 25 students ages 19 to 24 estimated the three-minute period accurately.

https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-1996-12-03-96112901...

So when this article says "if they counted seconds for an hour they’d think the task done with around the 47-minute mark", it's backwards. If we assume linearity (should we?) it should say that the average elderly person would take about 1 hour 15 minutes to count an estimated hour.

Confusing the issue, though, there do appear to be more recent studies claiming the opposite effect. This 2015 paper seems to clearly show that the elderly do take less than 90 "real clock" seconds to count off 120 "brain clock" seconds:

Objective: To measure a 2 min time interval, counted mentally in subjects of different age groups.

Method: 233 healthy subjects (129 women) were divided into three age groups: G1, 15-29 years; G2, 30-49 years; and G3, 50-89 years. Subjects were asked to close their eyes and mentally count the passing of 120 s.

Results: The elapsed times were: G1, mean = 114.9 ± 35 s; G2, mean = 96.0 ± 34.3 s; G3, mean = 86.6 ± 34.9 s.

https://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S000....

Unless I'm reading it wrong (the terminology of 'estimated' vs 'real' can be confusing), this seems to flatly contradict the earlier work by Mangan. It doesn't cite Mangan, though! And I can't actually find any of Mangan's studies online --- his CV lists his work (http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/pm46/vita.html) but without DOI's.
I think what you meant to say is that sounds like its just tweaks to the existing system

The antonim of reform is revolution.

It does not matter what you reform towars: You could reform democracy to nazism, or communism to market capitalism. In fact such reforms have happened before.

You could peaceeacefull and managed change of existing system is called
The VC model for funding technology is the root cause of user hostile technology. The pressure of investments that expect high returns is a feature/bug that determines the course these companies are likely to take. It creates the need to occasionally tade end-user freedoms for opportunities to "capture value".

Venture Capital also imports theories of scarcity and under-production that our entire open-source ecosystem have shown don't apply in the same way to the digital world. The funding of end-user friendly software development clearly isn't a solved problem but the history of the internet clearly demonstrates that our existing models aren't sufficient. VC is ripe for disruption.

I believe that the next leap forward to "make the world a better place" isn't new digital products but a new framework for how we build technology companies in the first place. We needn't accept this as a fundamental foundation that can't change - creative destruction is the name of the game after all.
So one thing that always comes up in relation to PWAs is the "Add to Home Screen" functionality. Literally the only time I've _ever_ used that button is when I was testing the headers involved for a client project. Am I an outlier? Do people use that feature?
> I hope you know that on the way forward, Firefox will be snap-shimmed too.

I see, so we're angry about things that haven't happened yet. TIL the OSS community has precogs and this is Minority Report!

Look, I get that two whole packages out of literally tens of thousands did this (I've seen lxd and chromium mentioned). But why don't we convict Canonical after they commit their crimes, eh?
A half hour to learn Rust
I imagine they'll do that for more apps down the line...
Once again I live mostly outside of the Ubuntu desktop world except for a few servers I have running. Dumb question here, but why 'should' a package management system (I imagine the job of which is predominantly installation/update/removal of software) impact the load time of a package once installed?
It's interesting. I feel like for each repository I understand why the recommendation is made, but the repos are completely disconnected from what's useful to me. It's a bit like "you bought milk, would you like a milking machine cleaner as well?"
There has actually been a great deal of thought (and some practice) on provision of services and community grassroots organizations by some strains of anarchism. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism

However whether a bottom up, decentralized, participatory democracy still counts as government... I will leave up to the reader.
It is if you have zero interest in snaps and just want to install good old debs with it.
Snap was neat when I first discovered it. I could get some bleeding-edge dependencies automatically delivered to my machine, without building it from source or having to manually update it. Wonderful! But the problem is: it's the slowest thing in the world. I've complained about this on HN before, but it can be hundreds of milliseconds from when you type a command to when the actual application starts running -- the intermediate time is being consumed by Snap doing god knows what. The slowness is a dealbreaker for me. My disk can read 500,000 4k blocks per second. My RAM can do 3400M transactions per second. I have 32 CPU cores. How is loading some bytes into RAM and telling the CPU to start executing instructions something that can take more than a few microseconds!? Easy: run that app with Snap!

I blew up my Ubuntu install and switched back to Debian. I haven't missed Ubuntu at all. I am resigned to the fact that if I care about a particular piece of software because it's the reason I use a computer (go, Emacs, Node, etc.) then I just have to maintain it myself. There simply isn't a good way right now. And you know what? It's fine. Everything is configured exactly the way I like, and it will never change unless I change it.
I certainly behave better in the presence of authority. It's unlikely I am the only one.
Click Wealth System Review
https://cialu.net/how-to-disable-and-remove-completely-snaps...
It looks like the "Data Fixes" section could introduce bias. "Select the right data" reminds me of researchers cherry-picking data for papers.
For me the Apple mouse is disgusting. It is quickly covered with sweat and other oily substances, making it even dirty then the plastic keyboard beside of it.
They are really beautiful mouses. I own all except the Apple pro mouse (which is identical to Apple mouse). Loved the clack clicking of the Apple mouse and what a design piece it still is. The Mighty Mouse was an improvement in usability but looked bland in comparison, and the ball would gunk up. Magic Mouse is perfect. But it’s very common to see hate for it. I loved that design era at Apple. White and transparent plastic like the cube, first iPod, lamp iMac! Iconic.
Caps lock is not useless, but its placement is totally inappropriate, and this has nothing to do with how trained you are.

In English text, and most programming languages, most of the text is in one case (usually lower), with small runs (often only one character long) in the other case.

For runs of one case switched character, shift will almost always beat caps lock because of the need to hit caps lock again to get back to the majority case.

Only when you get a longer run of switched case, or perhaps a shorter run where the letters nearly alternate between left hand and right hand letters so you are alternating shift keys or doing some characters with the "wrong" shift key if you are not good at alternating, do you change caps lock state.

For most text only a very small fraction of key presses will be to change caps lock state. Even Khassaki would only press it once. There is simply no way to justify putting it in the prime spot to the left of "A".

Also, while being in caps lock state is useful on some occasions, that does not mean that there needs to be a dedicated key to change that state. I suspect that something like pressing both shift keys simultaneously would be fine as a caps lock state toggle, or something like left shift/right shift/left shift.
uh... didnt early proponents of many worlds interpretation actually say that it did? Say Hugh Evrett? If it is reinterpreted to say otherwise, is it really the same QM model anymore?
> Third, for some desktop apps I want auto updates

> But as a desktop user, I appreciate that I have the choice.

Just so we're clear, it's not that the apps auto-update, it's that there's no way to stop them auto-updating.
This debate has been going on since before the pandemic. Parents have always taken sick days to care for kids, or show up late to attend parent teacher conferences, or knave early to go to soccer games or school plays.
Britain's obsession with school uniform reinforces social divisions
Speaking about art in SG. I find that street artists in Europe are way more better than those in SG. I’m always amazed by their skill and enthusiasm in my Europe trip. While back in SG, the only ones I see are art students or old uncles playing some music that you can hardly say “good”. This is sad.
You'd be very surprised how many socialists and communists there are in banking.

On one hand one of the things Proudhon and Marx agreed on was that driving down the cost of credit is an inherently radical act - the cheaper credit becomes the weaker the hold of employers over employees becomes, as it becomes easier to start for yourself.

On the other hand in finance you see the mechanisms at work laid bare.

Nowhere else than in finance and in far left groups have I seen the same extent of shared fear (AND optimism - people tend to be unaware the Communist Manifesto starts with fanboy-level praise for the advances brought by capitalism) about the long term societal effects of automation for example.
Unionized workers are more likely to assert the right to safe, healthy workplace
That's a good point, it was an overstatement to say I was forced to switch. The reason I did is because I naturally rest my right hand with my index finger at the gap between the i/o/9 or o/p/0 keys and the rest of the hand stretched comfortably, but all the vim tutorials I'd read suggest you should rest your hand at the home row. If I rest my hand like that, it forces me to use the touch typing technique that I diligently studied and practised at school but never found comfortable.
Whilst it depends a bit which ships you count- the world’s busiest shipping lane is generally regarded to be the Straits of Dover with about 400 commercial transits per day. [1]

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strait_of_Dover
I don't see electric passenger drone taxis (flying cars) ever having the reliability: i.e. safety over time to be viable.

I think small electric passenger planes carrying ~10-50 people seems a much better solution.

But in the future most transportation will be self driving cars for short distance, electric trains for longer distances, and electric planes long international travel.
Galaxy Z Fold 2 finally makes a good case for foldable phones
>But people look for you and connect on the popular platforms they frequent: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc. Back in the day even normies would pick up some tech and talk to you on IRC or USENET

Is that true?

Peak IRC users appears to be 10 million (2013) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Decline, Citation needed.

Pretending that all IRC users were in the US... That's ~3% of the population.

Usenet is arguably going strong (daily volume has exploded but isn't a useful metric here though. Can't find active users from cursory look).

~70% of US population are 'active' users of Facebook. This counts people that have only used it once in the last 30 days. And it's not a dichotomy - I don't think people have an issue stepping outside of facebook, as long as there are no barriers to entry.

Just playing devil's advocate, I don't disagree with you in general. I appreciate that my stats are lazy and blunt, but it shows how relatively minuscule the usage of IRC & Usenet were 2 decades ago, and that while direct messaging might be in a more 'walled garden' state, traffic to self-federated content is generally still as attainable.
Perhaps 'eternal september' has swung so far to the other side that the old non-internet users of the 90s have funnelled through AOL and out the other side to Facebook (and notably, it's easier to grab traffic from FB users than non-internet users), while the core tech demographic has remained 'in the middle'.
> Ubuntu 20.04 itself is based on debs, not snaps

This just isn't true. Its clear that Ubuntu is moving away from debs and to snaps. LXD is software primarily developed by Canonical and is only distributed as a Snap. Look at Ubuntu Core, the IoT distro by Canonical that doesn't use debian packages at all, it just uses snaps.
> Everyone believes they are capable of behaving reasonably themselves. If they think laws and police are necessary, it is only because they don’t believe that other people are.

I believe this is missing an important distinction between two kinds of law: common and statutory. If anarchists had laws, they would be common law, which simply represents accreted experience and wisdom about dealing with human conflicts that inevitably arise in any society.

I absolutely think common law is necessary, because it provides a long-term consistency and stability to human relations. Instead of individuals coming to ad hoc decisions about how to redress wrongs and grievances, they can rely on precedent which ensures some measure of fairness.