skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been there! My motorbike was in the shop for weeks, and they couldn't figure it out. A quick scan of the manual's troubleshooting section, a quick chat with the mechanic, a trip by me to the wreckers to buy an ECU and optionally get it refunded for $20 less, and bam, bike fixed.
I am not a mechanic.
Except it was worse 30-50 years ago. Do you really think what the NSA is doing now compares, vis-a-vis outrage (not scale), to what the FBI was doing in the 1960's? To analogize to the OWS protests, you think anything that happened with that is as bad as the Kent State shootings in 1970?

Going back further, watch this movie on Prohibition: http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition.

You think 4th amendment rights are being violated now, back then Prohibition Bureau agents were just sweeping houses looking for illegal alcohol. Seriously, watch the video. It should be eye-opening for anybody who thinks that the trajectory of this country has been towards less freedom and more corruption.

I don't see a boiling frog situation, I see the opposite: people getting more used to stronger protections against government and reacting more strongly to lesser outrages. That doesn't mean the outrages are less valid, but rather it means that the defeatism inherent in the "boiling frog" analogy is unwarranted.
A lot of things like Humvee's and APC's come from retired or surplus military equipment. Your sheriff's department isn't buying those things with your tax money.

The Army does, and then gives it to the sheriff's department when they're done with them.
I'll concede that I can't repair a car. It's no different from a mechanic conceding that he can't use a computer.

And I know that those are different words, that I can USE a car but not REPAIR a car. However, with a computer there is a vanishing distinction between the two. Sure there are some specialized tools and techniques that computer repair techs need to know about that regular people don't need. But in general, you need to know a lot about computers to be able to say you can use them, and that level of knowledge is usually sufficient to repair them.
I'm interested in that point as well -- are people in that age range an aberration in history? Are they more likely to be able to troubleshoot than the older grumps and the younger kids who only had one-piece gadgets? Likely not, but it'd be interesting if the generation that had to tinker with their PCs was unique to other generations.
The computer is a device that, most of the time, just gets in the way of doing X.

I responded to this in somewhat more detail down below, but I'll be really blunt here: Their own fucking unwillingness to seek out knowledge and have the patience to learn to solve problems is what gets in the way of getting things done.

And every IT person with bad manners or an unwillingness to teach whatever they know and answer questions is complicit in this farce.
Yes! Yet another person complaining about Bootstrap being uninspired.

With sites like Mailinator, I'm looking to get a task done and doing it quickly. If it lets me achieve my goal efficiently, I don't care if the aesthetics weren't designed from scratch with 100% hand written CSS or if someone is using stock glyphicons instead of hand drawn artwork by Mr.Ultra-Famous Designer.
Mystery Particle To Make Devices Even Tinier
Well, this news story is legit. The training isn't really new though, so I'm guessing they're just digging this up because of recent events enabling them to put some spin on it.

There's a link to the training itself in the article. It's not classified or restricted in any way. Everyone here can take the training themselves. It's actually one of the funniest bit of training I've ever had to take being a contractor working on a govt contract (not with the Pentagon, I don't know why the article mentions the Pentagon and DISA specifically... as far as I know ALL government agencies and contractors have to take this).

The training is very interesting, to me at least (but then again I find almost everything interesting, so I'm not really a good judge). You go into it expecting it to be kinda Orwellian, but they apparently anticipated that. And you'll get dinged if you're TOO strict!

Link to the training:
http://iase.disa.mil/eta/cyberchallenge/launchPage.htm
Three months is a really short time for a hardware company which forced us to postpone sleeping until after Demo Day :)
Money wise, it was kind of tough considering the cost for prototyping, 3d printing, flights from Germany etc. But I would say it gets you where you need to be if you're resourceful enough.
Proposal to Change the Default TLS ciphersuites Offered by Browsers
Chrome Web Lab closes; open sources experiments
Sounds like they fit in the "stupid and diligent" category and have successfully caused mischief.
>If that's true, then why don't they just, you know, end privacy?

By covertly erecting systems that end privacy (and attacking privacy tools like Tor), they are, in effect, ending privacy (without hurting the "US is a champion of freedom" brand to the same degree that explicitly ending privacy would do).
Interestingly, an Irish passport still gets the highest scrutiny at British borders, significantly more than say an Iraqi, Iranian or Libyian. That little bit of info surprised me recently.
Interesting. That would increase the need for more terrestrial transceivers or satellite transceivers to maintain active communication as objects spin.
He called the cops himself, and charged on them with a gun (seemly without firing).

I think this was suicide by cop... And the cops that have some sort of extreme fear of the population (perhaps justified, considering how badly the US population had been treated recently?) did what the guy wished.
You're completely right. This discussion is almost impossible since, for the human brain, I can't define "knowledge", "capacity", "limit", "intellect". I mean really, what does it mean for a human brain to reach capacity anyway? What function is it not able to do once it reaches that point? What does it mean to be smart or intellectual? Do we all agree that Stephen Hawking is those things? Why? I don't know and I can't even begin to debate it, I'm not smart enough. ;)
I missed it since the first thing I did after seeing the demo was click Sign Up.
That was my point when I said I've messed up. From now on I intend to spend more time teaching them rather than doing it for them.

Believe me, I never intentionally make people feel inept. I'm patient in the classroom, and teach to the ability of my students.
I like your examples as they all apply to pretty much everyone (as computing does) but I think we need to have a minimum understanding for all of them. Health, law, economics and computer classes should each have a pretty high bar. Being able to troubleshoot your computer or installing/configuring software should be just as important as knowing how to balance a checkbook or eat healthy and exercise.
I was going to start reading the article, but the TL;DR dissuaded me. The article look to be a long one, and if I just committed to reading every long article on the internet I'd never get anything done.
The beginning of the article should serve to get me interested and willing to invest the time to read the article, not as a snark remark to people who have already showed interest in your article by navigating to it. In the case that this is a reply to people asking for TL;DR on things you write: A tl;dr means that someone was interested in what you had to say enough to leave a comment. However you failed to show the worth of reading the article given the apparent size of it. You had the potential to get those who would start reading your article to see if it had value and told all of them to go waste their time.
This includes things that have become commonplace, such as downloading random tarballs off the internet and running "./configure ; make".

Nothing is safe.
We are all founders now!
On Owning your own Data
They've had some internal network problems lately. It's been really annoying but it's apparently fixed now.

The other thing is their billing system. We have ~30 servers with them and have to pay for each one of them separately. It's such a pain. I noticed something yesterday in the web console that I think solves this, but I'm not sure.
I've written several paragraphs elsewhere in this thread explaining my feelings on the article and on other comments--try to hold yourself to a higher standard than merely saying "other guy is right article is bad" without backing up your points.

Having commenting privileges on a forum does not automatically validate your opinion--at least give us a stacktrace.
We've been a customer for a few months now and use it to power the runtime for our App-Development-In-The-Cloud[1] startup. Very cool, and Chris et al are very nice and helpful guys!

[1] http://www.cloupp.com
How is not obvious to US citizens that the "enemy" that Manning was charged of aiding was themselves?

As a Brazillian, to me US looks like there is some sort of weird government vs. citizen war... And citizens are clueless about it, except a few fringe groups.
Having been that kid that plugs the Ethernet cable back in for the kid sitting next to him, and figures out how to connect the projector to the computer at the start of class, I understand where the author is coming from and I am similarly concerned that people are not more up in arms about Internet censorship in the UK, yada yada.

So, yeah, the tone is a little harsh, but if I had to deal with these sorts of user support requests every day on top of teaching class, I'd be grumpy too.

Managing a network when all the users BYOD and/or have administrator access isn't as trivial as the author makes it out to be; I remember wiping "Deep Freeze" off of a school computer unintentionally once when I installed Ubuntu on it in dual-boot from a CD. Eventually the school district moved to a thin-client solution; wasting the thousands of dollars they had spent buying (then) cutting-edge general-purpose computers in the first place. But it's certainly the ideal; it's what I think we should be aiming for.
In California and Colorado hash e-cigs (called vape pens) are commonly sold. Making your own cannabis fluid is a huge hassle (I should know), but it is sold commercially.
I didn't have associated the idea of "printing" to a "human organ" yet. Very interesting. I wonder if, in the future, printing an organ would be easier than making it grow somehow until it gets functional for transplant.
It's an arms race between the cops and robbers. 30 years ago the cops carried .38 special revolvers and maybe a shotgun. After incidents like the North Hollywood Shootout, where criminals had body armor and semi-automatic rifles, cops had to step it up. You can't stop a bank robber with body armor using a .38 special.

Eventually, the cops will have to step it up again when criminals get access to armored vehicles, better body armor, and bigger guns.

In 10 years the LAPD will probably have an F-22 to shoot down the helicopter a gang of bank robbers starts using.
Yes, but he moved the goal-post when it comes to his car example. He's imagining a future where nobody knows how to drive. In the present, we already have people who can't maintain their own cars (and don't want to) just as we have people who can't maintain their own computers (and don't want to).
http://vimeo.com/24762526
How is this different from highway robbery or privateering?
I wonder if Americans know how long it's been since the US started taking photographs and fingerprints of every non-citizen entering the US?

That feels a bit privacy invading, but there wasn't much fuss over it when it was introduced.
You are underestimating the power of knowledge. I've fixed computers for people who are much smarter then me and have a higher intelligence by every reasonable measure.

The reason I can fix computers is that I know about things like DHCP, "The Registry" and BIOS, systems that have very little to do with logic and are only understandable by using them for decades.
Very good point -- you'd have these fast, expensive transistors (however they are packaged or not packaged) cache their data, then transfer it back to a slower, cheaper, main microprocessor, which would be doing the rest of the device's work.

Do you know where these 10 GHz transistors can be found?
>"They click ‘OK’ in dialogue boxes without reading the message."

This. And you know what, as software developers, it's partially our fault. Even I, as a "kid who grew up in the tech age", do this (albeit rarely) as a force of old habit. Before I knew anything about computers the error messages that would pop up would sometimes be so obscure that there was really no other choice, you just get used to them being implicitly unhelpful. The other part of this is that society is so rushed. Who can spare a moment to read and troubleshoot an error message? "Why won't this thing just work!?"

As far as people being able to "use computers": I'm not completely aligned with this but I do question whether or not they should have to be a sysadmin to do so? I don't have to be a mechanic to driver a car (as several comments have already pointed out). Computer's are just tools to most people. They expect them to work and when they don't do what people expect they call someone who knows about them to fix it; there is literally an industry built on this need. Don't most of you who build software work to create something that solves a problem for a user? Makes it EASIER for them to do something that was previously complicated/convoluted/impossible? They're just users, not domain experts.
For shorter distances, time-of-flight is not typically used. There's surprisingly little documentation about how these things work online though.

From http://ptd.leica-geosystems.com/en/Measuring-Techniques_4939...

"The laser diode emits light pulses with a defined wavelength and pulse repetition frequency. Due to the runtime difference between the internal reference path and the external measurement path, the light pulses, reflected on a target and received from the Leica DISTO™, have experienced a phase shift in relation to the light pulses received through the internal reference path. That phase difference between those two signals is proportional to the distance between instrument and target."
People here are passing judgement on the guy for writing the post, but in reality his point is 100% correct: People don't know how to use computers. It is way more important for us to have a generation of people that understand computers than it is for us to have a generation that understands how to repair a car. Computers bring along things like freedom of speech, digital currency, taxes, etc. Knowing how the internet works is paramount to supporting the proper policy decisions. The fundamental difference between well governed countries and the US with respect to internet legislation is the relative computer literacy of the people involved.

Beyond the political, much of our unemployment problem is less a problem of governance, and more a problem of a lack of appropriate skills. People want to raise the minimum wage, but that will not help the poor, what will help the poor is to make themselves more economically efficient. Being able to properly diagnose, design, and debug technology is a fundamental way for a country to stay competitive (read: first world).

Furthermore, the reason he (and I) are angry is that we grew up automatically freed since all of our programs ran with easily readable code (QBASIC). Kids these days don't have that opportunity. Fuck, they can't even RUN code they've written on their pocket computers without shelling out for a developers license.
Then why don't children learn to drive in elementary school?
"but later in college
when they finally get to hear all this stuff, they’ll really appreciate all the work they did in high
school.”

So painfully spot-on. My mathematical education was horrible. Meanwhile I had been writing code since I was a little kid. It wasn't until I was an adult that I realized how much math I had been learning while programming. And worse, that I had been completely miseducated about what math actually is.
On the other hand, when I was a kid whenever I broke something on the computer it was my responsibility to fix it. My parents told me I broke it, so I'm able to fix it. So this particular paragraph really actually resonated with me, because if it weren't for my parents going "Well, you broke it, if you don't fix it it's going to stay broken." I probably wouldn't be nearly as computer savvy as I am today, and I probably wouldn't have gotten into programming (ok, maybe I would have, but certainly not as young as I did)
My educational background is in computer science. I took my car to the dealer and they said that transmission fluid had leaked into the transmission control unit and the unit needs to be replaced.

Many people would just have the service done. The difference in the thoughtful approach is what questions you ask. How does transmission fluid leak upwards? (Capillary action through the electrical harness). Can the transmission control unit be repaired? (They said no, the answer is yes). What is the root cause of the problem? (They said "it happens sometimes").

If you stop to ask the questions and think about the answers, you realize that transmission fluid does not spontaneously leak twelve inches upwards in a functioning car. I had a mechanic find and replace a leaky bushing, clean out the transmission controller with electrical contact cleaner, and flush out the electrical harness, all for less than the cost of replacing the controller (which wouldn't have fixed the problem).
I am trying to fight my stereotypes. Could you please point me to some github repos started by chinese/indians and that are awesome?
People may not like how this message is delivered, but I've worked support at a university full of supposedly smart people and saw the same sort of things. It's a real issue that I hope the raspberry pi and associated efforts do something to address.
My favorite IT request was someone asking to put the internet on a disk for them.
Ubuntu Edge Passes $9 Million, Smashes Crowd-Funding Record
Thanks for pre-ordering one of the devices. We come from the measurement Industry and were struggling with the same problems. We designed Senic to be the most flexible device it could be. We will give out a few apps for iOS and Android that relieve the biggest pain for people (mostly in the building industry) but will keep developing more applications (new apps, integration into existing software, Linux support etc.) If you have any suggestions or questions, please write us. We want to learn as much as possible and make it the best product on the market.
Did you read past the initial example with the proxy settings? He talks about kids who can't figure out that their monitor is off or the internet cable is unplugged - those aren't advanced settings, and they're scenarios of kids not knowing how to "make them do what they need them to" when there's the slightest deviation from their normal procedure.
I hadn't heard of a single one of those except for Tumblr. Why are they valuable?
How goes plans for manufacturing a full-size liver? A friend needs one.
I am laughing pretty hard at all the comment here that rants on the first few paragraph and then brings points that are actually covered later on in the article...

Yes, he is being harsh with the teacher. Yes, cars are complicated.

That's not the point. Read the full article...
The issue in the article was that the proxy was needed to circumvent draconian content filtering. I learned how to use proxies in school specifically to work around this.

You can complain about your problems, or you can refuse to learn how to fix them--you don't get to do both.
I guess we disagree where the level of minimal understanding lies. Why should kids know how to install and configure software if they'll only use Android and iOS in a few years? Knowing how an IP address works as arcane as knowing how an oscillating spindle sander works.
I just set this up accessible over the internet, building my blog. I've since removed the service/webhooks, but feel free to login at http://stinemat.es:3000 to play around. It's extremely cool.
> It's disheartening that despite the continual stream of information pouring in about the NSA the average citizen remains comparatively indifferent

The reality is that tens of millions of Americans are struggling to make ends meet, working multiple jobs, juggling credit cards, mortgage payments, car payments and trying to get by with little to no healthcare.

These people are too swamped by the day to day to have the time or energy to look around at the bigger picture. Life is too hard already.
Tor Browser Bundles updated with Firefox 17.0.8esr
I suppose if you want to be a cog in a machine instead of a human being, this is a reasonable position to take.

Time you "waste" is time the overworked IT department doesn't have to, in a company that's not too big to function. Your knowing more is never a waste.
yes, that's one of the things that our old customers were missing. Combining there measurements with geo-location, time, other sensors etc.
Hyperloop - What Will It Be?
>> He's done more in five years than you've done in 20. You can't train that. People just are.

> I do believe that all healthy human beings do have the same potential for the amount of knowledge they can consume, at least at birth.

If there's anything I've learned from my experience in neuropsychiatry research, it's that there's a whole lot of natural and environmental variation in human biology and psychology. I've seen kids who would otherwise appear healthy and sociable score astonishingly low on cognitive tests (e.g., on executive function, pattern recognition, block design, etc.). I've also seen kids who would otherwise appear completely healthy and normal score amazingly high, by way of extensive schooling and parental attention (and also very often, wealth).

So I'd disagree with both comments above that (1) intellectual capacity can't be trained and (2) healthy humans have the same intellectual potential.
"I want the people who will help shape our society in the future to understand the technology that will help shape out society in the future."

The people who shape our society will know what they need to know. I'm not sure a great understanding of a desktop PC is going to change this.

On a separate note, the author is demanding that everyone be super knowledgeable about a set of devices that is on it's way out. I think it's far more relevant for people to understand how their phones,tablets, and the internet work than understanding how to re-install windows...
Obama Said to Outline Steps to Assure Public on Surveillance
We assume that growing up with computers makes you expert with them, when it doesn't. I wrote about this last year [1].

Since then, I've realized something important: things fall apart. Always have, always will. It's just thermodynamics. This means that we have to keep rebuilding our world. Which means that the people who build things really control the world. Remember that the next time a techno-illiterate sneers at you: you are building the world they inhabit, you get to decide what it looks like, so pity them.

[1] http://javajosh.blogspot.com/2012/06/note-to-parents-compute...