skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To be fair, if you use a friendly distro like Ubuntu you don't have to touch the command line unless you want to or you're trying to do something reasonably advanced.

Ironically I also find that I can often get things to work much more easily too.

Tried to setup a printer the other day under Windows 7 and went through a process of faffing around with HP drivers, updates and weird dialog boxes.

Under Ubuntu I told it to print and it basically said "on this printer?" , I said "yes" and it printed.

Also trying to share files between 2 computers on a LAN is an order of magnitude easier.

The bigger problem is that lack of strong options for certain types of software (e.g Music editing, Graphics editing, Games) under Linux and also support for some types of hardware. Though these would be quickly rectified if it had marketshare.
If that's true, then why do many already rich celebrities continue to participate in grossly commercialized lowest common denominator work? Being rich doesn't mean you don't want to be richer.
What the hell is going on. Why is the name of this mysterious "senior administration official" not released? He is completely mirroring the Obama line. It's not like hes blowing the whistle on any secret information and his name needs to be kept in the dark.

This has been a trend all over the press. It is time they realize they are taken for a ride in what is just another completely mundane, coordinated attempt by the government to control the public opinion.
It's not just architectural differences; Apple goes out of their way to make OS X break on the hardware they don't sell. This is a definite violation of freedom zero.
>Most users don't know what sudo, wget, make, or apt-get commands are, just to start.

Have you used Ubuntu recently? Or Mint? They've made a lot of strides in that direction, including fancy graphical package installers.

On the other hand, when I use any Linux, I typically drop to the shell and edit config files, but that's because I'm always trying to do something unusual. Otherwise I wouldn't be on Linux to begin with. But for the 95th percentile of what typical people use a computer for (basic email, web browsing, maybe basic text editing), Linux is as easy to use as a Mac or Windows. In fact, Windows and OS X only recently are catching up to how easy it was to get software on the popular Linux desktop distributions: It was a matter of running the software installer app and selecting the programs you wanted. Now Windows and OS X each have their own "app stores", but Linux had that bit of convenience first. The only thing that prevents Linux from being on more personal computers is the fact that it doesn't ship on them. Consider Android, which is a Linux fork, is on millions of devices (a million a day are shipping now), so there's nothing wrong with Linux that can't be fixed with a few apps to smooth the edges.

No, being a power user is what keeps me on Windows. There are no sufficiently good replacements for:

* Adobe Photoshop/Lightroom (and Creative Suite in general)

* Sony Vegas Video

* Corel Draw Suite

* FL Studio

* Visual Studio

* Microsoft Word & Excel (don't get me started on how badly OpenOffice sucks...I've tried to use it for years, and they just can't get even close to "It Just Works.")

* Netflix and Amazon streaming

Any one of these would require I keep at least a virtual Windows instance around, and some (like FL Studio) really need you to be running on the raw hardware.

I've tried, again and again, to use free versions of all of the above, and the usability and feature set is nowhere near what I need in the free offerings. I've given up at this point; there are just too many critical apps on Windows for me to jump ship.

>And I have used iTunes on Windows, and I found it wasn't bloated.

In my experience, iTunes on Windows is one of the most hated pieces of software around; probably second only to QuickTime. I hate it with a passion, and I hate the fact that I can't use other software instead. I'm running 16Gb of RAM, an i7 with 8 threads, and a fast SSD hard drive, and yet it's still slow and frustrating, not to mention awkwardly designed and buggy. Not sure what you're running that it doesn't seem bloated, but it absolutely (and frequently) screws up in talking to iPads. And the fact that it considers every new upgrade a "new computer install", threatening to lock me out of my content and devices if I don't "uninstall" it first from the older computers (that have been reformatted) is absolutely infuriating.
The warning in that link is very interesting.

The catch-22 you've described is why it's so important for as little to be classified as possible. When secrets are kept from the people who those secrets are intended to protect, it is impossible for the people to know and debate their value. It creates two classes of people: ordinary people, and their rulers who possess this special information.

This is why even a vague societal acceptance of the idea that safety requires sacrificing certain rights is exceedingly dangerous. It creates a slippery slope where the people make progressively greater sacrifices to the "cleared" class so that, according to that same class, they can protect the people. But the people never know if they were safer. All they know is that they gave up rights for a promise that may or may not have been kept.
A tip for anyone using this as a plugin for Pidgin: generating the keys usually takes a lot of processing power, and needs to be done once per account in Pidgin. The generating process triggers the first time you start messaging someone that also uses OTR with that account, which is often an inconvenient time (as you don't always know they use OTR beforehand). You can trigger the key-generation for an account via the plugin preferences of OTR, that way you can get that part done while you're not chatting.
True story: after writing this 2002 blogpost -- http://www.openp2p.com/pub/wlg/2448 -- a researcher preparing material for the 2004 remake of 'Manchurian Candidate' contacted me by email looking for more background material.
FYI, the Poles are searching for the Supreme Administrative Court of Poland - "Naczelny Sąd Administracyjny."
I'd love to. If you could find a way to limit civil service to 6 years, I think you'd find things work a lot better. Obviously you'd need exceptions for things like the CIA and the military, but those could be managed.
That computation is probably something you were already familiar with in disguise: it's just the law of cosines [1][2] along with the fact that a matrix of inner products can be computed with a matrix-matrix multiplication [3].

The first claim is just that for vectors x and y in an inner-product space ||x-y||^2 = <x-y,x-y> = ||x||^2 + ||y||^2 - 2<x,y>, and the second claim is just that if you collect a bunch of vectors into the columns of X and another bunch into the columns of Y, then the (i,j) element of X'Y is <x_i,y_j>, i.e. the inner product of the i'th vector in X with the j'th vector in Y. (Bonus fact: you can use that relationship to translate the statement "this set of pairwise distances can be embedded in a Euclidean space" to an equivalent condition that some simple matrix is negative semidefinite on a subspace orthogonal to the all-ones vector. Euclidean metric embedding is very useful!)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_cosines#Vector_formulati...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarization_identity

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramian_matrix
Did anyone catch the dig against Chinese Internet freedom?

"For this reason China, despite the fact that it does not have a good reputation as far as Internet governance is concerned, should move boldly and grant Snowden asylum."

If this is official government propaganda, why are they saying China doesn't have a good reputation?

The article also calls for Google to withdraw from the United States on the same grounds it withdrew from China - hacking of Gmail and state surveillance.
I wasn't trying to imply OS X or Windows are a "bed of roses" - frankly, they're not.

I agree with you that the euphoria comes with freedom of a linux distribution. That sentence was a bit of dry humor on my part.

But my point still stands, and it's not black and white. Windows and OS X aren't perfect at all despite being proprietary, and linux isn't terrible for being so open. In fact, I'd recommend every programmer be comfortable with linux and navigating the more complex advantages it presents, especially server-side.

But I really can't honestly say it's more convenient, or that the software you run on linux will typically be as well-designed and as useful as a proprietary system. It just isn't. And that's okay, but it's a self-perpetuating cycle because people don't want to break into linux and make it better without higher benefits and salaries, but those won't come without associating linux with quality, open software (and getting past the whole non-profit issue).
Often it's just a case of downloading and double clicking a .deb.

Though I do agree that the UI for the software store as well as the process for adding third party repos could be made a lot smoother and the release codenames are confusing,
Create a Geofence Using I Am Near
No simplified tax code proposal I've read would eliminate the problem of people doing cash transactions under the table, or "loaning" themselves a house and treating that as a business asset.
That search box on the site looks strangely familiar...
it's taken me a good 5 minutes to convince myself a single device can be both AND and XOR. that's weird stuff.

is there any way to get AND, XOR and NOR in a single device "for free"? after all, they don't overlap (only one is 1 for any given pair of inputs).

also, how do you build a practical system when the flow rate is not constant (AND doubles the flow here, for example)?
Both the IRS and NSA are part of the Executive branch.
Why is a dude wearing a shirt on the front page?
No; Bitcoin sacrifices some of the nice features of the known possible digital cash systems in 1996 in exchange for an ad hoc sort of decentralization. Arguably, that's why it's succeeding - decentralization turned out to be more important than either high-powered security proofs or efficiency (my essay on the topic: http://www.gwern.net/Bitcoin%20is%20Worse%20is%20Better ).
Yeah, schedule the worst stuff at times with fewest senators available. Same way the Federal Reserve Act was passed a century ago on December 22, 1913.
POLESHIFT IN ONE DAY
You're comparing a pre-configured out of the box computer with a computer that you are configuring yourself.

There are companies who sell Ubuntu computer pre configured with drivers etc installed. System76 for example.
Probably because he's the most powerful person on the planet wearing a t-shirt which signals that he stands for the very value's most assume he disregards?
No, what's happening here is that Google is continuing to push the USG to be able to publish fine-grained data, while Facebook is publishing less informative aggregates.

In other words, Google is going to bat for its users, and being punished for it because of the optics that sets up. How does it feel to be a tool of the NSA? :)
Martin Luther King Jr. was wiretapped
martin luther king jr was wiretapped and sent an anonymous letter from J hoover encouraging him to-kill himself
Sorry, I probably should have explained a bit.

My point was that he's willing to hold an irrational view for the sake of his politics.

I don't think people like that have anything important to say about issues like the NSA programs.
"Keith B. Alexander (born December 2, 1951) is the current Director, National Security Agency (DIRNSA), Chief, Central Security Service (CHCSS) and Commander, United States Cyber Command."

-wikipedia
https://www.tarsnap.com/ usually comes up when talking about Dropbox alternatives, I have not used Tarsnap myself but I've seen many who have been pleased with it.

I am not sure if there are any big Dropbox competitors operating from outside the US (if NSA is your concern). There should be but I am not aware of any.
Great, now I'm totally reassured.
This is Keith Alexander[0], the current director of the NSA. It's ironic that the person wearing a shirt from a group that strives for digital rights, including privacy, is worn by the Director of an agency that is trying to snoop on all communication.

0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_B._Alexander
This expands on my point really well. Designers, more than anything else, have to 1) know the problem better than the user, and 2) interpret what users say they want/need to ascertain what they really want/need.

They also know how to differentiate between what users want, what users need, and what users think they want/need, but which they really don't. It's a practical difference that goes beyond what's merely possible in programming. It also includes what's feasible and targets the problem most successfully.

Designers have the burden of preserving coveted features, furthering a competitive advantage, and removing features that confuse users.

It doesn't help users to give them everything they need, it only obfuscates software for them. A minimalist program that perfectly achieves what one group of users wants is superior to large software loaded with every feature requested ever catering for the entire market.

It's like buying a suit. It's better to get one tailored to your exact measurements (needs) than to buy a suit mass produced in the most popular, requested sizes.

In theory, proprietary software cannot fulfill this function as well as open source, because a programmer could just identify his own problem using his own experience and solve it. But in practice, this doesn't scale to anything larger than an individual, so proprietary software comes in, where skilled designers are paid heaps of money to do all of the aforementioned.

If there's one thing that kills open source software, it's the amount of decision making it places on users. Good designers (which cost money) know which decisions to make themselves so they don't confuse users.

This also goes hand in hand with freedom zero. Users don't want freedom because they don't want to make decisions. They want a problem solved but they don't care if they're "free" while it's done. They just want it accomplished so they can be on their merry way.
http://askubuntu.com/questions/4983/what-are-ppas-and-how-do...

All the third party software I've seen for ubuntu has had a PPA, and those are simple to install via GUI.

If an application is so fringe that it's source-only you might need the command line, but that's nothing compared to the pain of compiling programs with dependencies on windows.
In a normal scandal story, the appropriate committee would grant immunity to Snowden, have him testify, then bring up Clapper, have him testify, and compare notes. Preferably publicly.

Have you seen Manning lately ? White as flour. Shows how much exercise and sun he has been getting while in jail. Snowden would be insane to come without an unconditional pardon/ and full immunity, not just immunity for what he says in Congress. He knows what awaits him in US jails
Browser's web inspectors need to integrate this tool.
... it's still interesting
Most powerful guy on the planet? I hadn't heard of him until now.
First, to clarify, the remote desktop limitation was never accidental. It was a deliberate obstruction built into Windows XP that was meant to stop people from using the OS as a multiuser server. It is no different from Maltab contacting a license server to determine if there are too many people using the program at a time (as was the case at my undergrad university) or a parking garage refusing to release anyone's car because a license expired. The Windows Server version supported multiple simultaneous remote desktop sessions (with an artificial limit imposed by the software, that depended on the license; Windows XP Home/Professional simply had this limit hard-coded).

I think you are lacking citations needed to prove your point that we would not have movie and music players if they were not deliberately restricted. There were digital music players prior to the iPod that were not so restricted. CDs never had any restrictions built in; what makes you think DVDs would never have happened without the restrictions? I know for a fact that you are wrong about HDCP, because the same cable receiver had HD component outputs that had no HDCP requirements.

To put it another way, if people demanded Freedom 0, they would have it -- and there would still have been DVDs and iPods. The MPAA is not going to give up a multi-billion dollar market. They obviously want to restrict how people use their computers, because it increases their advantage in the market, but that market would not disappear if they did not have that increased advantage (if they only had all their other advantages). The same is true of the software market, the music industry, etc.

It is not a choice between Freedom 0 and "some kind of empty void;" it is choice between Freedom 0, and not having Freedom 0, with everything else remaining largely the same.
What’s more important: a college degree or being born rich?
Maybe the like doing it?

Or maybe the solution is just to pick celebrities that hold themselves to high standards. So... not Nicolas Cage.
The Fair Tax would take care of most of that. Any transaction with a business would have sales tax. There are no write offs, so the business asset would not fly, neither would be buying Ferraris.

http://www.fairtax.org/site/PageServer?pagename=HowFairTaxWo...
The problem with marketshare is that it's a cycle. Getting marketshare requires those kinds of features (generally), which requires paying your engineers a better salary (again, generally, there are exceptions). But that won't happen without a marketshare to bankroll better engineers. And at that point, you might as well be proprietary.
Wired had a pretty good article about him the other day.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/general-keith-alexa...
Context:

"Nicole Smith, an associate attorney at Tully Rinckey PLLC in Washington, D.C., and a former security clearance investigator"[1]

"In a photograph posted online after Snowden revealed himself, his laptop displays a sticker touting the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a longstanding advocate for online rights and staunch opponent of government surveillance. That would have been enough of a warning sign to make it into his file, Smith says"[1]

And the EFF respond by showing a picture of the director of the NSA wearing an EFF T-Shirt.

[1] http://nation.time.com/2013/06/15/potential-blind-spots-in-c...
Big +1 to this. Airline security is there for...airline security, right? Exactly what is the justification for placing this woman on a watch list? Do they suspect that she is a terrorist?
Do you have a source for that 75% number? He's one for 22%: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations#Funding
http://clinteastwood.net/mayor
> Without arguing in favor of Guantanamo, which is indeed a travesty that urgently needs a decisive fix, there is a difference between detaining foreigners captured in an active combat theater because the State earnestly believes them to be an immediate, violent threat to Americans and "disappearing" its own citizens.

There's also, it must be noted, a fairly enormous difference between "detaining foreigners captured in an active combat theater because the State earnestly believes them to be an immediate, violent threat to Americans" and what the US government has been doing with the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, in which the government has detained many people who it never had any reasonable cause to believe were an "immediate, violent threat to Americans" and many of the prisoners were not captured in an active combat theater.
The NSA throwing suspicion on EFF, perhaps. Or flashing colors of an NSA honeypot. Or he's just fucking with all of us. Maybe he just likes the shirt.
In my opinion the best way to raise awareness with the general public, not those who would seek out a website on their own, is to go where they are.

I would use the same technique Apple used to change minds when the iPhone was new. Come up with bite-sized ads, and play them like regular ads, many times, but instead of advertising for a product, they should educate.

The media is doing a terrible job at this. The same way Google tries to force ISPs to change with Google Fiber, we should try forcing the media to step up by putting them in a bad light, by focusing on the important problems they're ignoring.

Imagine 30 second ads that focus on non-partisan information, stats not emotions, factual information like current laws and how they're not followed, a focus on a more global picture, on something more long term, something that would make you think and be more aware.

There's a lot of misinformation out there. We know this from the numerous polls that show large number of people believing things that are factually and provably not true.

We need to correct that first.

EFF, ACLU, and other organizations like these are trying, but they're not reaching most people. We need to reach and educate the people who have been turned off by the current state of affairs.

We need Twitter-size ads that people would find interesting and that would wet their appetite to seek out more and get involved.
Housing expenses (especially in SF area) make that really tough. But if you're married with both of you working, only have one (used) car, and both of you live frugally, it can be done.
we'd label him a neoconservative corporatist in the same vein as Cheney

Only if you are a child who is unable to appreciate that people are far more complex than simplistic labels. Why not call him a socialist fascist as well ? Or a war monger ? Or a liberal ? Or anti capitalist ? Oh wait there are some contradictions there.
For those that don't know, Naspers also owns 35% of Tencent. They are heavily investing in internet companies in emerging markets.
The Business Secrets Worth All The World's Riches
>This is disgusting. A news agency that is known for defending its own governments' dirty stuff, twisting truth, and manipulating public opinions, is now appreciating a freedom fighter and a human rights activist.

So, exactly like the major US news outlets, from the Times to the Post to CNN? It's very hard, as a European, to find any news coverage of world affairs in the US that doesn't subscribe to the official Washington party line (with small diversions, according to which of the two parties the outlet/author supports).

>If you are interested in what their reactions were when this kind of thing happened in China, back in 2010, this [1] (google translate: [2]) was xinhuanet's opinion on Chinese human rights activist, Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Liu Xiaobo [3]. They described Liu Xiaobo as an evil man used by western countries to attack Chinese government, while the truth is Liu Xiaobo spent years striving for Chinese people's freedom, human rights, and constitution enforcement in China.

So?

There is a way to strive for your people's "freedom, human rights, and constitution enforcement" that's in accordance to your countries and your people's needs (even if your government hates it) AND there is another way to fight for "freedom, human rights, and constitution enforcement" that serves the agenda of foreign powers. The second way is mostly how you earn a "Nobel Prize" (which Obama also got, oh, the irony).

It's difficult to convey the above distinction to an American, not because they can't understand it, but because they haven't experienced it. See, the US is a world leader, so there's not another country that can even think of using people to influence American politics, topple politicians, grab it's resources, etc. Things that happen all the time in smaller countries -- and more often than not, those people ("freedom fighters", etc) are agents of US foreign policy (or French, or UK, etc -- it's what's called neo-colonialism).
I use tarsnap and like it but it really isn't a dropbox alternative.

If you want client side encryption with close to dropbox functionality use spideroak, if you want snapshot/dedupped/backup + encryption use tarsnap.