skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a stretch for me... Should every kid know how to install Linux? And troubleshoot a proxy? Hmmm.... And is this important if they can't read or write well?

I view computing as a great topic for those that are interested, but technology is getting easier. I want my kids to learn about it, and consider it for a career. But mandatory? I won't turn my nose up on anyone who doesn't understand proxy settings.

That said, I recall a finance professor bemoaning that most Phd students in his department don't program any more. "This will limit the kinds of research that they can do."
I also loved the TL;DR. My first impression wasn't "this guy is an asshole" it was "wow, it's refreshing to see someone openly reject idiots on their blog."

Maybe not idiots exactly, but I agree with the derision of short attention spans.
http://danwalsh.livejournal.com/31146.html

One very simple way to get a sandboxed browser is to run this command (my irony meter is going off the charts here):

sandbox -X -t sandbox_web_t firefox

However, that will prevent any persistence between sessions, so you probably want to do something more like this:

sandbox -X -H /path/to/some/directory -t sandbox_web_t firefox

My recommendation is that you read the man pages and experiment a bit.
Nope, all companies receive the same funding (as in base amount + x per founder up to 3)
Nexus 5 Release Date: Next-Gen Google Smartphone Arriving 4th Quarter 2013
He's from LA actually.
Ok, let me put it another way. If there is a variation for the amount of knowledge the brain can consume from human to human, assuming they're "healthy", it's gonna be something like Infinity x 99, infinity x 8, Infinity / 2. Whatever it is, it'll be a limit that's way beyond what a human being could ever reach in a lifetime.
It's like the wasp that lays her eggs inside a big juicy caterpillar.
Maybe she was tired, clearly she was frustrated, but it wasn't obvious that she held the author in any disdain

Are you kidding? She's a school teacher. Stress-free living at its best.

It's been a long time since I've read an essay by an IT person so proud of their lack of bedside manner.
Computers are used in most industries today. Framing, not so much. The ability to use a computer is becoming nearly as important as being able to drive. Sure, you can do without it but you're probably not going to go very far.
Amusingly enough, in Russian there's an expression (with a certain nuance) "You have to know everything."

It's simple: life is vast, complicated, and you will be fucked in every possible direction you are ignorant of. You have to know everything. Cutting off a piece of reality and saying "that's for technicians" is for schmucks.
What the hell is AMD?
It's not that much fun and, if you value your time, it's not cheaper.

Factor in the time to buy the oil and the new filter. The time to clean up the funnel and pan. The time to properly dispose of the waste oil. Consider the busted knuckles trying to open the drain. Consider the stripped drain plug.

My neighborhood shop charges about $30. They use some kind of suction device that I think does a better job of getting the gunk out than gravity does anyway.
What should I do with my domain flixz.com?
I've had this domain for years and years, and haven't developed anything on it yet.<p>I know there is nothing special about domains anymore (with so many new viable TLDs), but assuming I have strong web / mobile development skills, what product would you suggest I develop on it?
Is this a real trojan found in the wild, or something they came up with to show how sneaky trojans could be?
Can you explain what actually changed when the sheriffs took over for the local police? Aside from everything was then better?
There's no inherent reason for them to care and it's incredibly insulting to presuppose that an entire generation should care about the same things he does - especially when these types of people purposely make it more difficult for people to care (example: being sarcastic, condescending, and "calling the President")
Just unscrew the bolt on the oil pan underneath the car

Getting to that point on many cars (I'm looking at you VW/Audi) can involve many more steps - on my last car, before you can even get to the oil pan, you have to remove the belly pan which involves three different types of fasteners, 6 of which are hard to reach unless you have a 90-degree screw driver (which I do). Getting to the oil filter requires removing the coolant tank (and disconnecting the coolant tank sensor) and scraping your knuckles while trying to position the filter wrench. From all accounts, the procedure looks to be worse on my Jetta.

While I am someone that loves to DIY auto maintenance, I can perfectly understand the decision to let someone else handle it.
There is the Lapcat http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/lapcat.html which would be comparable to Concorde and uses a Sabre variant called Scimitar, however the article never mentions it.

Personally I think whoever wrote the article did almost no research and just conflated the Skylon and Concorde in their heads, then just wrote down why what they had imagined did not make any sense without realising that it was not in fact what was being proposed.

edit - thinking about it, they also only used the mach 5 number in the article. The Skylon is designed to go five times that fast to get to low earth orbit, the mach 5 figure is just the speed while air breathing.
You are entitled to have these problems only after you start a company and sell it off for a billion dollars.
> The problem isn't that these people can't use computers. It's that they can't THINK.

How do you know?

I presume that you believe that you have critical thinking skills and wouldn't make similar mistakes in other areas of life, but what is your evidence?

You probably know how to use a computer, maybe even fix a car. But how can you know that you don't have similar blindspots when it comes to health, finance, relationships, education, things that are seemingly easy for some people but inexplicably hard for others?

It's too easy to scoff at people being dumb by judging their computer skills on a site called Hacker News. Imagine the analogue article and discussion on a a site called "Fitness News".
Mike Adams: Three Security Issues You Thought You’d Fixed
I could also add that nowadays people don't know how to use cars. They might as well be magical boxes that take us places and nothing that happens underneath the bonnet is important. And just like in this article - there are people who are perversely proud of it. They are proud that they don't know how to change a wheel, how to check oil level, or even refill the washer fluid. In fact, they don't even know HOW to open a bonnet. I know people who could ignore the most obvious of signs that something is wrong - loud noises, visibly low pressure in the tyres, high/low running temperature......

In fact, I imagine we could write an article like this for pretty much everything. I knew a guy who would call an electrician to change his lightbulbs. People don't know how to use anything, and there is nothing we can do about it,since most people are incapable of being mentally engaged in something they don't care about.
The total revenue of the gun industry (which doesn't count a lot of ancillary things like hunting lodges) is 1/8th of Google's---which points out one way this analogy isn't useful. We gun owners are powerful because they're are a lot of us, we're organized, and we vote.

Getting Google et. al. to resist this requires an entirely different approach.

Ah, one good analogy: while it was owned by some Brits, Smith and Wesson was the only company to play ball with the Clinton Administration in 2000 and it got crushed by a boycott: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_and_Wesson#Agreement_of_2...

But, then again, it's only because we're politically organized, and had to do so in self-defense starting in the '70s, that this came about. But if a prominent Internet company lost 40% of its business due to privacy issues that would get serious attention.
Learn You Some Erlang for Some Great ZOMG
Even the most savvy computer user will make stupid mistakes... For example I once wondered why my display didn't work when I had apparently accidentally hit the "Input Source" button so the display was no longer set to DVI and didn't know how to get it to work... I guess I "can't use a computer" in the author's mind?
Obama, tech executives met to discuss surveillance
Schneier on Security: Latest Movie-Plot Threat: Explosive-Dipped Clothing
First, thanks. The focus of the article is obviously on ways to identify and evaluate recruiters from an engineer's perspective. The part about some recruiters being pretty was something I felt worth noting that was on my mind (a few mentions to me recently), but not worthy of an entire post.

The pretty part is just an abbreviated rant on the way the industry is headed, where substance and knowledge are being replaced by trying to get a candidate's attention with shiny things. It's not new, just annoying.
So you don't believe that there's a spectrum of disability? You're either intellectually disabled to the point of not being able to dress yourself... or you're a potential Einstein - nothing in between?
To extend your car analogy, I wonder if the author knows how to fix his own car? I certainly don't. I know it involves pistons and carburetors and...tubes.
The 30-50 age range can use computers because they spent the early half of the 90s trying to get VGA games to run reasonably well on their 386s. Or they were laying in front of the commodore, recreating code from a magazine. Me and my friends tried to recreate songs on it.

At least that's how I got my start. What's your story?
What causes discrepancies in low-power bike computer calculations?
I agree with point #1, saw an APC rolling around in my town. Very confused. My town has below-average rates of violent crime compared to both the state and the nation.

Although rather than being worried about our police becoming militaristic (they are pretty good, I feel), I was mostly concerned with who paid for it!
Todd Humphreys: How to fool a GPS
There is a little of both in his statements. The one about the computer not turning on is a common occurrence these days where people let their computer sleep and just move/click the mouse for it to turn on but can't cold boot the machine. This is similar to calling a mechanic because your car won't turn off because it isn't in park.

Most people don't need to know how to change proxy settings and such though. It would be nice if people had the ability to google solutions but it hasn't become important enough for them to learn so they take the easy way out and wait to ask someone.
Hahahaha. Oh man.

And if they violate the Rules of Engagement, it's going to hurt a lot worse than paid time off.
I can't upvote this enough. As someone who was lucky enough to have flown on Concorde 20 years ago (almost to the date), I'm extremely sad that it isn't even an option anymore. The thrill of hitting mach 2 and being able to see the curvature of the earth is something I'm going to carry to the grave. That's just sad.

It simply feels wrong that we were able to make it happen and couldn't figure out a way to make it sustainable in all this time.
Which is weird when we compare that to the STEAKKNIFE[1] infiltration of the IRA. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakeknife)

[1] I like this convention of putting everything secrety in capitals.
I found that the author came across as extraordinarily condescending with the whole "let's get the president on the phone" thing. I'm sure that the woman he was dealing with understood full well that the "Internet" itself was probably fine and that it was her configuration that was the problem. Though I guess he took the holier-than-thou approach because she didn't use the precise terminology that he would have preferred, heaven forbid, which warranted him degrading in her a blog post.

Amusingly enough, I work in a web shop and I wouldn't think twice about asking a colleague, "Is the internet down?" and he would understand full well that I was referring to some issue between our office machines and our ISP.
Except the technology (a simple google search, for example) eliminates the need for a computer technician, or even a plumber if you have the right tool for the job, so long as you know how to pose the right question. This article is railing against student's inability to see that they too can fix their technical issues without relying on a computer technician like some kind of modern day shaman.

This is about the ability to pose questions, to understand that the problem has been solved by other people, and to have a bare minimum understanding of how the world around them works.
Information Dashboard Design, 2nd Edition
Backend Web Programming needs Scalability and not Performance
They are getting better though. HTC One, Moto X, Xperia Z all are very well built and on par with the iphone. I love the aesthetics of my HTC One and many people i show it too (including iphone users) think the same.
Have you ever been a school teacher? Or was that sarcasm? I'm going to imagine there are quite a few school teachers who would not call their jobs stress free.
I don't consider lawmakers openly calling for the systematic suppression of a particular minority (and deliberate non-enforcement of the law against vigilantes), to be that similar to a nanny-state approach towards regulating content probably enjoyed by the majority of adult men. And I haven't seen even the craziest of British regional political figures propose whipping porn-viewers in public squares. I think that rather actually trivialises the issues faced by gay men in Russia.

It's a bit disappointing to see the generally better-informed anti-censorship brigade resorting to the same hysteria and half truths as the Mary Whitehouse brigade. Opt-in porn censorship that probably won't even work simply isn't the same as bigotry, and likewise it's disappointing to see the linked article - actually one of the better and more nuanced articles I've read on the subject - repeating the widespread claim that the UK government's policy says anything at all about opt-in filters on esoteric material and web forums (a meme apparently started based on a screenshot of one of many commercial filters used by ISPs that's been around for years without causing any controversy)
It must be true for others, too. happy_dino is a good example.
Yeah, but it is a really inefficient way to run a society. Time I waste figuring out why my corporate overlord's choice of email client isn't working with the server when I have little knowledge of the backend infrastructure is time wasted for the company.
It's of particular interest to me because it really strongly illustrates the gulf between the two. It's a pretty solid introduction to both of their positions, and goes in interesting places.

> Imagine if I wrote hopefully useful code, but it was extremely hard to read
> and poorly documented... What properties would we expect that code to have?

This is not the right analogy. The right analogy is a C programmer looking at some Haskell code, and complaining that they don't understand where memory is allocated, where the pointers are. I mean, after all, who can get real work done without pointers?

Let's examine his essay, but substituting in Haskell and C... actually, wait a minute. I know I've heard this before... ah yes, here: http://byfat.xxx/chomsky

Okay, so that's only kinda what I'm saying... what would you think about this paragraph?

> But from 50 years in this programming game, I have learned two things: (1)
> I can ask friends who work in object oriented areas to explain it to me at
> a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular
> difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I
> will come to understand it. Now functors, arrows, hylomorphisms, monads,
> etc. --- even first-class functions, whom I knew and liked, and who was
> somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't
> understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand
> can explain monads to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to
> overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new
> advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic
> mutation, which has created a form of "programming paradigm" that is beyond procedural
> programming, structured programming, etc., in depth and profundity; or
> (b) ... I won't spell it out.

You'd probably say "seriously, stop being an idiot. Haskell is hard, and strange, and weird, but it has value. If you like C just keep on writing C, no need to be such a jerk about it. But Haskell is for doing different kinds of programming than C."
Perhaps the issue is that there is this expectation that everyone should know how to "use" a computer. We forgive older generations, because it's something they never grew up with while being appalled at younger generations because they're not using computers to do technical stuff. News flash: computers are not the end all be all of the world. It's simply an aspect of it, and while some kids won't give a crap about how computers work, others will be wildly passionate about it. Some kids will grow up to be doctors, lawyers, scientists, teachers, artists, philosophers, and excelling in their domains does not come with a requirement of knowing how to connect to a wifi network.
I do believe that all healthy human beings do have the same potential for the amount of knowledge they can consume

Nope.

There are a lot of non-intelligent people out there. No matter how hard they try, they're not going to be theoretical physicists. If you think these people have the potential, but they're just not trying hard enough, that's an extremely bizarre view of the reality of their existence.

You're right though that David Karp's $180M payout is, in part, a product of luck and forces beyond his control.

According to probability, Karp probably is better at most things than a random person on HN. But is he better because of his $180M payout? Karp experienced a unique set of circumstances beyond his control (as each of us do) and none of his life experiences prevented him from reaching this payout (extremely lucky).

No doubt, his success and achievements suggest he is smart, hardworking, dedicated, etc. But another person, twice as smart, twice as hardworking, twice as dedicated, is affected daily by a totally different series of external events beyond his control, any one of which might preclude him from realizing the scenario where he gets a $180M payout.

And, some people choose paths in science/engineering/software/anything that preclude the possibility of a $180M payout. The researcher toiling in a lab to push forward the boundaries of human knowledge and achievement is most likely going to earn a modest salary his entire life (modest, at least, relative to Karp's). Is he worse in any way because he didn't create a microblogging platform that existed at the right place at the right time? Of course not.
http://lmgtfy.com?q=JavaScript+AMD

Asynchronous Module Definition - a method of defining JavaScript modules, to be loaded when needed.
You must not have read the article, because it explicitly mentions cars.
For your first sentence, I would rather say that they DON'T want to think when it comes to computer/maths/etc.

"I don't like it, hence I'm not good at it." gives them an easy reason to avoid the problem.
I see so many security problems like this that would be caught so easily if there was just a process with super basic statistical analysis capabilities watching the logs. A POST to the Copyright.php file? I'm guessing that would never be found in your logs before the bad file was deployed. Something that watches the log and determines if the entry is very different from the usual contents of the log (pick up the book 'Programming Collective Intelligence', there are a dozen different techniques you could use for this, and even the simplest should work very well) and alerts you.

And yeah, if you ever see "eval" in any code anywhere, the hair on the back of your neck should stand up.
> Are they ignorant, apathetic, or malicious?

Nice use of the 'false choice' rhetorical device.

I'm not sure why you think that every employee of a large organization is somehow ideologically synchronized, operationally involved, and morally responsible for every policy decision made by the organization.

That isn't even true in small organizations, never mind large need-to-know organizations.
I pretty much agree with you, but I think the point is that focusing on technical education and incentivizing that learning (like the WPA2 key hidden in a 10,000 line text file) can help build critical thinking skills.

If instead of putting the computers to the side, actually building positive learning experiences involving computers, the critical thinking will be a natural outgrowth of that, IMHO.
yep, and it would die if companies just stopped paying the ludicrous placement fees, which run about €10k I think. I know it's a lot of hassle for companies to find good staff but surely the HR people can do it instead of forking out that kind of dough.
FWIW, I did the same thing. It needs to be clearer.
By engaging in a line of comments that is so far from reality

Just because it's far from your reality doesn't mean it's the same for everyone else. People are constantly bombarded with articles about the US engaging in potentially illegal and unconstitutional activities that affects a lot of internet users, so it's only natural people get upset about it and let their emotions run wild, thus resulting in the "paranoid" comments that we now regularly see.

You should take the time to show these people an alternate point of view, because your comment will not only be read by the person you're replying to (who may or may not change his mind), but also by the thousands of lurkers who don't even participate in the discussion.
Related, relevant issue: I know people — in Silicon Valley! — who are proud of the fact that their elementary schools (private) have no computers, and avoid the subject entirely. Apparently they believe computing too early will change, for the worse, a child's brain. I suspect it would do the opposite: help their children be better critical thinkers than their parents obviously are.

You know, books change the way the mind works, too. That's bad. Better keep books out of the hands of children before their minds are warped.
I'm not rhizome but I'm pretty positive that the "stress free living" comment is sarcasm.
I pressed back immediately after reading this opening. Not because I fall into the category of person the author describes but because I'm not bothered reading an article written by somebody who starts their blog posts by insulting their readers.
So far, just doing a bit of both