skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The purpose of running a distribution— any distribution— is to outsource a bunch of basic work that all systems need. After all, I could do all that stuff myself just from source, but I'd like to get something _else_ done with my life too.

The problem with Gentoo is that it just doesn't have an active enough development community to keep up with that task in the way that Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, or even arch can... so you're stuck doing a lot of stuff yourself, or using old software that you wouldn't be otherwise. Important bug fixes get left marked unstable forever, etc.

I think this is really unfortunate because Gentoo does better capture the inherent advantages in running an open source operating system.

As an upstream developer, I've found that Gentoo users seem to pretty much the only GNU/Linux users who send _patches_ with their bug reports— even more so than the _packagers_ of other distributions. It's especially remarkable when you consider how many more users these other systems have. I don't believe that it's just because Gentoo attracts the geekiest of the geeky, it's because the distribution inherently gives all the users the tools to contribute back and makes them take some of the startup costs, empowering them to contribute.

I wish all distributions were more like gentoo. Innovations in other areas are also important, but there is something to be said about recognizing what makes your system uniquely good and maximizing it— rather than imitating the competitions' strengths... in contrast to what I see with the major distros copying MSFT's and Apple's Signed-everything secureboot stuff, and their bondage and discipline tablet oriented UIs.
No, he questions founders of enterprise startups on a field they don't have deep knowledge.

If I found a startup that wants to improve how car dealers sell cars, but I never worked selling cars, nor I know car dealers, why I am founding this.
Not art, but Blender is the biggest example of "buying out for the public" that comes to mind.

Blender used to be proprietary software, and when their company went bankrupt, they crowdfunded 100,000 euros to release their code as open-source. This was a decade ago. Blender is now the most popular open-source 3D animation software today.
We're talking about a sample size of one computer here right?
Translation: "He's only guilty of loving too much"
His arrangements are interesting, to say the least, see http://joey.hess.usesthis.com/ . The whole thing is worth a read, but here's a sample:

> So the whole house runs on 12 volt DC power to avoid the overhead of an inverter; my laptop is powered through a succession of cheap vehicle power adapters, and my home server runs on 5 volt power provided by a USB adapter.
Telegram no more STOP 100 STOP
It is potentially useful to tell someone that there is information missing in something they have written. If they're smart, they don't want to inconvenience their readers. In this case, it didn't matter much because the target market already knows, but you don't know until you bring it up.
You might find it interesting/useful to read about:

steganography[1], anonymous remailers[2] (particularly the Mixminion[3] type), the Paranoid Security Guide[4] (which was on HN today[5]), and a nice talk on privacy and anonymity options[6][7]

There were also a couple of lists of darknets on HN recently, but I can't find them right now.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_remailers

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixminion

[4] - http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=24722

[5] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6040381

[6] - Part 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHoJ9pQ0cn8

[7] - Part 2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9fByRmAHgU
Apparently US airports and police departments also bought them. However an article about white people being dumb probably wouldn't get as many page views.
I don't recall where I read about it, but my understanding is the developer lives a very frugal lifestyle in an off-grid environment, something akin to homesteading but with an internet connection. His costs are as minimal as he can make them, and in turn he can both spend more time on his work, and be fully commissioned with campaigns like this.

I think he was also involved with the Debian GNU/Linux installer.
> if you can't create another example or analogy off of the material you are supposed to be teaching, then you actually don't know it as well as you think

This is actually a fairly good metric for telling a good teacher from a bad one. Constant use of analogies without making things too convoluted is a pretty good strategy to become an effective communicator.

People love seeing/matching patterns, so if you give them patterns that they can associate with, that'll do like 90% of the communicating for you, then all you have to do is just fill in the blanks.
Android proves nothing of the sort. People don't necessarily buy Android because they like it, but more because because it is pushed to them by the parties that directly make money off it: the carriers and their data plans and contracts. Google makes money from the ads people see on those phones (which, apparently, it shares with the carriers, so you can see how the incentives line up.) The hardware makers get the scraps (which are still plenty, as Samsung demonstrates).

Note that the parent is also wrong: Linux PCs typically cost more than their Windows equivalents because there's no crapware to subsidize the cost.
Any five page article featuring phrases like Alexander’s sensibilities is fluff. His proposed solution: Private companies should give the government access to their networks. Really? Let's not get too far in to the obvious totalitarian risk and sheer bureaucratic idiocy of such a perspective.

Pathetic puff piece on a morally bankrupt individual.
Not used it. I've used AppCode, RubyMine and IntelliJ all great products.
Every time AWS blogs and an Amazon employee submits it.

Every time the YC network artificially pushes each other to the front page or posts a job.

Every time some startup writes about random startup shit completely unrelated to whatever they're selling just to pull traffic from HN.

Every time publications including ITWorld, ExtremeTech, Geek, MacObserver, DailyDot, BetaBeat, etc, have had undisclosed employees shilling their links.
The Worst Portfolio Ever
Likely that beyond whatever punishment he receives under the judicial system, there will be little other consequence to him for his actions.

People do bad things, and get away with it all the time.

EDIT:

Interesting aside: Just world fallacy [1]

[1] http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/06/07/the-just-world-fallac...
I don't think I've encrypted an actual email even once.

However, I do encrypt attachments or drop-box blobs from time to time. E.g., I might make a self-extracting PGP archive of a directory of tax info encrypted with a symmetric key, put it on Google Drive, and send the link to my accountant, having shared the key out of band.
There two reasons I have up on Gentoo several years. One was a period of very high drama amongst the developers.

The major one was packages never being marked as stable. There was a file you could add packages to in order to allow unstable versions, but it just kept getting longer and longer. If I wanted long term stability, I'd use Debian. For desktops and workstations, I expect things to be "fresh" where each distro has their own tastes for fresh, but certainly measured in months. (I switched to Ubuntu because I knew I'd get fresh Gnome, at a time when there were good system enhancements like NetworkManager.)

A quick check on http://packages.gentoo.org shows that no version of Gnome 3 appears to be marked stable. For the software package I am an author of, the most recent version marked stable was released 13 months ago and there have been 10 releases since! LibreOffice does seem to be an up to date version, as does emacs.

One area when Gentoo shines are the docs - they are very very good. I did try Arch a while back and ended up in a maze of using the wrong one out of official and unofficial documentation.
He's only listed three advantages that I can discern.

1. "but users of binary package management still install extra support for things they may never use."

2. Custom kernel with only what you need

3. "Even menial things such as choice of system logger and cron daemon can be chosen and configured exactly the way you want"

Why are those meaningful advantages? For example, if it makes my computer run faster, great, but does it? (I doubt it.)

Most of the other stuff is just giving major props to Portage... I mean yeah, I'm sure the "revdep-rebuild function" is great, but since I'm using a binary distro, I don't need it!
It's not Fluttershy (and now I'm ashamed of myself for knowing that. I don't actually watch mlp, I swear).
While I agree with your premise, do you have a reference to the US authorities purchasing these.
So the problem people have with this is the lower cost to the store? They'd be happy with the tracking if the store had to spend more resources to do it? I doubt it.
Oh, why the color! I can't read anymore.
Choice of menial things (author's words), "flexibility" of having only what you need. Touting a shorter compile time as a benefit against binary packages. Good stats on an old machine.

These all seem downright odd as benefits.

> Finally, the control over your kernel configuration is a huge selling point

WHY? Why is this a huge selling point? Why would I, the OS user, care if the kernel is tiny and tailored? What does it materially change when I use the computer?

I guess my reasons for picking an OS are just too different. I prefer something that lets me do all the things I sat down at a computer to do. Ideally, I wouldn't even know what OS I was using.

I don't mean to demean the users of Gentoo. Especially if there's a joy to it - if you enjoy configuring kernel-level stuff, distribution hacking - that's great. All that power to you, and Gentoo looks like a good fit. But defending it with these kinds of points just seems tired and strange.
Of course. But it works much better if you hold a huge press conference and make a big deal out of it.
Probably because then you'd have to have a templating language implemented in a templating language in order to render templates.
Which is cheap compared to, say, a private investigator. Not to mention that it scales a lot more easily -- and such data is a lot more fine-grained and more easily manipulated than any report you'd get from a P.I. trailing someone.
"If you quibble about what makes you and what doesn't make you a hacker, you're probably not a hacker"
iOS and Android devices send a WiFi "ping" every so often - I believe this is done to improve locationing accuracy, by augmenting GPS data with WiFi signal strength data. You can read these pings from any AP, even if the device is not associated with the AP. You'll only get the device MAC, but that's enough to tell you the device make and get a unique ID on the customer.
I think the point is they wouldn't stand for it if minders followed them all over the store.
I almost fell out of my chair when I realized this was from D'Youville College back where I group up. Interesting idea for a Linux distro although I'm not immediately clear what a 100% in RAM OS is good for but that's probably just my ignorance speaking and lack of wearing a Tin Hat. So I guess I take that back, I do see what this is for, if you wear a Tin Hat.
Disruptions: Hollywood, or Silicon Valley: Where’s the Money?
Thanks for clarifying that Kabdib, I wasn't aware that was the story.
You're describing the complete other end of the pendulum swing from me. You're placing the burden on the student - and when it comes to new material, that is the absolute last place you want to place the burden of learning on. Look at oblique's last post under your response to him/her and you'll see what I mean.
Good thing about bash script is that it works when you compile on remote Linux machine. terminal-notifier works only if you development is completely on Mac.
>>First, this is for a "vp of engineering" that is "hands on". Are you really looking for an architect that codes?

Sorry but why can't a VP of engineering be somebody who should code(even if occasionally) or some who could be competent at a code review. Its precisely this kind of attitude that gives ammunition to the MBA culture of appointing people who are clueless about their current job to manage the best people under them.

The net result is getting people appointed who know nothing about the people they managing, or the line of work. And just take blanket common sense based decision which most of the times are wrong with regards to the domain they lead.

Regardless of who you are- architect, VP or whatever fancy title. If you claim to be the leader of a group of people with some specific skills you should be somebody who at the very least has mastered those skills.

According to me anybody who claims to lead a group must be the best among that group, in the job that group performs.
How does git-annex compare to bittorrent-sync?

(I'm a big fan of Joey's other work, so I bet this is top notch, there just seems to be more momentum behind bittorrent-sync.)
Look how prescient the NSA are. They've been working on this capability for sixty years or more.
I wonder, where does Scheme fall in on this whole, uhm, scheme?
Especially w.r.t. this part:

"[Clojure] doesn't have facilities to control the reader in the same way CL does: actually, in this regard Clojure is very different from Lisp — it hardly provides facilities for controlling any aspect of the language — and this control is a critical part of Lisp's DNA"

Or, is Scheme as good for stratified design as CL?
Welcome to the PHP ecosystem.
he's not saying that, he's talking about raising a child, not making one.
> Google has lost. Yahoo has lost. Twitter has lost. Microsoft has lost.

Lost in what sense? The question here is whether service providers can be compelled to send data that was never stored on disk to law enforcement. I've seen the news that Skype calls are streamed (in accordance with their privacy policy[1]), and I guess this can be viewed as Microsoft losing, but what about the others?

1. "Skype, Skype's local partner, or the operator or company facilitating your communication may provide personal data, communications content and/or traffic data to an appropriate judicial, law enforcement or government authority lawfully requesting such information. Skype will provide reasonable assistance and information to fulfill this request and you hereby consent to such disclosure."
You mention printing. This is the singular reason why I prefer pdfs myself. PDFs are viewable in the browser and resizeable. They are operating system agnostic. Most importantly, they preserve the formatting that the original author intended.

This is not to say it can't be all done natively in a browser, with resizing based on screen or print resolution. Just that most paper authors will not be savvy enough to do it right. It's enough for them to learn LaTeX properly (the only option for typesetting equations) and I doubt tooling for doing what you suggest will come any time soon.
Dude... go build it and have people pay you.
Ask HN: ios identifierForVendor
According to the identifierForVendor documentation:
The value of this property is the same for apps that come from the same vendor running on the same device. A different value is returned for apps on the same device that come from different vendors

Given that we're about to be able to transfer ownership of apps from one vendor to another, does anyone know if the identifierForVendor id will then change?

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/uikit/reference/UIDevice_Class/Reference/UIDevice.html#//apple_ref/occ/instp/UIDevice/identifierForVendor
I've always hated this argument.

Banning efficiency, of all things, seems counterproductive. If someone (or a government) really cares, they can simply spend the resources to do full-scale surveillance and tracking the old-fashioned way. It's not like we'll refuse to pay for it, given budgets what they are today. Lack of technology didn't stop the surveillance apparatuses of the USSR or East Germany. They just had larger staffs than we do.

Either something is okay, in which case it's okay to do with a machine, or it's not, in which case it's not okay to do at all. If it's okay to tail someone with a police car, it's okay to follow them with a drone. You stop mass surveillance not by making it cost the taxpayer more, but by outlawing mass surveillance and requiring some sort of suspicion or probable cause for each individual case.

People who want to track and surveil others like efficiency, but are in general still capable of hard work. Raising the effort required stops only the most pedestrian violators.
Agreed, they could achieve the same thing with security cameras and facial recognition (though way more expensive I imagine). People aren't up in arms about security cameras in store.
"There's something wonderful about this manuscript that accumulates so many different interpretations, that's broad enough to encompass them all at the same time," he says. "As soon as it's forced into one particular meaning, then it sort of loses that mystery, and I think that's sad."

... the mystic aesthetic, a love of the unknown, a worshipping of that which cannot be defined. An ancient and human preoccupation. Well, almost. http://i.imgur.com/NEVR8y7.jpg
bittorrent-sync is closed source.
One has to wonder when law enforcement will treat polygraphs with the same disdain, they're effectively the same thing as these 'Quadro' devices. Unfortunately polygraphs are convenient low-impact torture devices, and they're also useful for measuring someone's tenacity.
Security personnel undercover as shoppers already exist and are widely deployed to surreptitiously follow suspicious people. We can and do and will continue to stand for it.
http://www.ctan.org/pkg/tufte-latex
They tend to be more subject-specific communities. Lambda the Ultimate (http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/) is good if you care about programming languages, for example.
I can't believe I missed that. Thanks!
> According to me anybody who claims to lead a group must be the best among that group, in the job that group performs.

I think this is an error. Taking your best coder and then spending their time on not-coding is wasteful of their talents.

Furthermore, insofar as you create competition to hold that position, you're creating a destructive work environment. Software development is a cooperative activity that can't be efficiently partitioned.
It's okay for them to have the data only if the reporting functionality is poor? What?

Either it's private or it's not.
> or some sort of phone ID is gathered without a customer deliberately giving it to the company

Chances are better than good that they're capturing your MAC address. While not necessarily unique, on cell phones, it's probably as good as in the vast majority of cases.
(Until recently I was the co-founder/CTO at RetailNext - we analyze shopper behavior in retail stores, primarily using computer vision but also using WiFi signals and other methods.)

WiFi signals contain a device MAC, which gives us a unique ID on the customer. This allows us to track repeat visits to a store, and even visits to different stores within the same retail chain. We can also track the WiFi "pings" from your device to see approximately how long you were in the store, whether you passed by the store without walking in, etc. Essentially the physical-world equivalent of data that google analytics provides you for your website.

The type of data described above is not quite possible to obtain via video as face recognition is nowhere near as robust, certainly not when it needs to be done non-intrusively as in a retail environment.

Video is still very useful however as it gives us 100% customer coverage - many customers still don't have smartphones, many that do keep WiFi turned off, many stores don't have WiFi APs, etc.
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Sadly, I fear you're right. At the most they'll probably get a slap on the wrist and those who were complicit in buying the Snake Oil (knowing they were bunk or not) will get scarcely above a stern word or two.

Rather depressing to think about.
I have 8GB of ram. I stopped caring about my OS footprint a long time ago. I sometimes forget VMs running on my workstation and never notice. My system resources are essentially limitless; my time is not.

I used Gentoo for a while thinking I cared about the system logger or cron. I don't. 99.9% of stuff can be installed with the default settings. Painting an actual racing stripe on my workstation would be a more efficient use of my time compared to the cost and any mythical benefits installing Gentoo provides.
You can't gather movements without a unique identifier. How would know which points belong to which path?

The MAC address doesn't lead to your name, address, credit card, or anything. It's just how they tell one phone from another.
I am curious - what were you trying to get done through RepairPal? I was under the impression that they just provide repair estimate and shop listings...
I wish they simply hyperlinked their sources.
Only your device MAC is collected though, to track things like repeat visits, so I think it's similar to how websites track your IP. There is no "database" today to associate the device MAC back to any personal information.
I only rarely encrypt email messages themselves, mostly because few (if any) of their recipients have personal certificates. Of my encrypted messages, most aren't sent using S/MIME or whatever we are calling the standard these days - recipients get a link to a web site, where they have to register an account, authenticate, and view the message. That's not only cheating; it's also pretty weak in terms of assuring confidentiality. To be honest I think the point of the web site is that it lets you send large files to people, not strong crypto.

All of the email servers I operate support STARTTLS. Transport-layer security is just as important to me as message integrity/confidentiality/authenticity. If I could get away with it, I would force all SMTP traffic over TLS, just like I already do with my web sites (even my intranet sites are HTTPS-only). As with my human correspondents, many of the MTAs out there don't support SMTP encryption.
Of course, this used to be called "Startup News" but then PG picked the more general "Hacker News" instead.

While not everyone reading and posting on HN is a hacker, the website was founded by one of the world's greatest. So, I think that justifies the title.

Still, no matter what you publish, those outside your intended demographic will always read it. If you made a website called "Gangsta News", I'm sure white suburban kids from middle class families would read it.
Digital Ocean is much more expensive for the same setup...
Free classified ads. Wonder if this isn't monetizable. Paid "Ads" for higher visibility of your sheep for sale?
That's an interesting perspective.

I've never considered polygraphs to be beyond anything more than a fancy stress meter (cause be damned), but now that I think about it, it does function quite well as such an instrument.

Goes so well as a corollary too: "If you've got nothing to hide, you wouldn't mind some mild torture to verify that fact".
Equally disturbing is that you'll have no knowledge of what it's used for. ex: Maybe its used in a AI algorithm to help drones figure out the most efficient way to kill everyone in an enemy country.
White Noise and Field of Vision.
Taking some simple steps to try to focus my mind and improve my life.