skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> freaking IRS audit

I don't mean tax returns, I mean regularly filing audited accounts. If they have filed those, I'd be delighted to find out where I can obtain them.

> no serious person doubts their 5 million cited membership number

The figure for NRA membership has been an active controversy for the last decade, after a former NRA board member asserted that the NRA was lax in a number of ways about how it maintain its membership list (e.g., not taking people of their list of life members when they died). The WaPo did a short Q&A about it - http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/does-t... (a rare example of a WaPo story on the NRA that didn't get attacked by the 2nd-amendment media)

> only a fraction of the country's gun owning population

At what, 2%? Which makes the fact that they are de-facto the voice of gun-owning voters kind of odd.
Well, I dont know how to fix any brand of car but I know how to drive them because I had to learn it before I could drive.

People don't want to learn to do things, they want anyone else who knows how to to do it, that why they don't try to fix anything by themselves. They just run to the nearest geek and ask them to fix it, even if it is the easiest task.

Just ask them to pay you $50 everytime the answer for their problem is in the first page of a simple google search. That way I got a lot of lazy friends to learn o fix their shit.
Same here, I'm still not clear on how to modularize things (even thought the aufs layers seems module friendly)
First sentence mentions Vint Cerf. Founding father of the internet, recently wrote this: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/opinion/keep-the-internet-...
Seems like it could be argued both the gag, Schnail Mail, and the real gmail are fairly upfront in the relationship with the user. Advertising is present. Obviously, some technical differences but it IS disclosed!
Again, these are different questions. You're talking about establishing a statistical model to determine whether nations, in general, would respond to such incidents the way the US did. I'm talking strictly about establishing why the US did what it did.

If your point is that America is an outlier in this regard, I agree with you! But when you're trying to establish cause and effect in one specific case it doesn't really matter what other data points outside that case say. What matters is the internal dynamics specific to that case.
There's a difference between can't and won't. This issue is the latter, as exemplified by the example where a kid was hitting OK so fast the actual error message couldn't be read.

As a professor, I was astounded at how many students failed just because they wouldn't do the work. A large fraction were certainly capable of doing so (some spectacularly capable), but just...didn't. Having and increasing a vast array of educational resources available wasn't the solution because they wouldn't take the first step, no matter how simple.
Someone's MacBook doesn't connect to the internet.

At this point, connecting to different wifi networks and turning on and off the radio should be considered basic knowledge--if you'd like to argue to the contrary, please save us the trouble and acknowledge that you want to remove any semblance of security for users.

The proxy probably threw up a message describing that it was working properly, and that the requested content was blocked because of $reason.

Things were working as expected and designed, and the user tried to do something that was outside of that envelope. If the user wants to do more, the user should learn to do more.

Someone has embedded a YouTube video into a powerpoint presentation.

User did not understand the idea of remote content. User should be made aware of difference in remote content, possibly even later going on to use it to make smaller presentations where appropriate, or to guarantee operation in network-limited situations.

A user's laptop is running very slowly due to virus infection.

User acknowledged that they were aware of virus scanners, used file-sharing programs, and voluntarily did not take prophylactic measures.

A user complains of a computer not turning on, but it turns out the machine is on and the monitor is off.

User has apparently never used a television with a separate cable box, or a car with a radio, or a projector with a laptop. User now knows better, and can teach others!

A user cannot connect to the internet even after trying various software settings.

User did not understand function of all buttons on machine. User now understands function of wireless toggle on machine, can help others.

A user attempts to log in to a network site/computer.

User deliberately skips impatiently past diagnostic information sufficient to immediately ascertain source of issue and enable rectification.

User will go on to one day become stranded in traffic having ignored "low fuel" light in car.

A user has a new iPhone and is sad about loss of contacts.

User bought into frictionless ecosystem, and was not notified that the needful was already happening automatically--though pondering the question "what if my phone breaks?" would've prevented this.

(To be fair, this is outright poor software design.)

A user complains of not having internet access.

User never bothered to learn difference between shortcuts and files. User now knows difference, hopefully.

A user thinks they have a virus.

User does not notice telltale UI mismatch, and does not know machine well enough to catch that. User hopefully now knows better.
The difference being, there's a mandatory "new user training" before you're allowed to operate a car. Take something like a riding lawn mower that doesn't require new user training, and you'd better believe manufacturers worry about things like "does the user know that letting off the brake means the mower will accelerate to full speed instantly?" You end up with people who know how to operate a riding lawn mower and those who don't, and it explains why many new mowers come with car-like accelerator and brake pedals (with "cruise control" for the classic crowd), and also why mowers will disconnect the battery if the operator isn't sitting in the seat.

If a new computer required mandatory training and a license to operate, these issues wouldn't be nearly as common. Besides, how many people are absolutely flummoxed by a manual transmission?
Dubious syllogism. Baseball players certainly reward capital, in spades. by all accounts, overweening NSA surveillance is hurting capital as Europeans in particular seek other vendors for cloud services.

Not to mention the fact that baseball is a sport of entertainment, and is you strike out people won't be blaming the deaths of others on you.
the first sentence..

Google Inc computer scientist Vint Cerf and transparency advocates also participated in the meeting [..]
Bitcoin held to be a currency under US Law
That's very cool. I definitely need to check out things out. Thanks everyone for the interesting discussion.
"...Herman added that despite such meetings, "It's not clear yet that the White House appreciates the need to scale back these surveillance programs substantially instead of just rationalizing or tinkering with them.".."

I welcome any attention the president can give this issue. I also acknowledge as Commander in Chief it is his role to be publicly responsible for this mess. As Chief Executive, at any moment he can pick the phone up and make substantive things happen n this issue. Having said that, what we really need is legislative relief.

Here's hoping we don't get a feel-good PR statment and posturing geared to divide the electorate instead of solving the problem. I have my fingers crossed.
We have English classes since we need to read and write on a daily basis. We have math classes since we need to add/subtract/multiply on a daily basis.

But why don't we have a technology literacy course where kids can learn about devices we interact on a now daily (hourly?) basis. It could be taught at a low enough grade level before the geeky become geeky so-to-speak. Something beyond just typing skills.

Demystifying the magic behind a computer/smartphone/tablet may even encourage those who wouldn't give a second thought to coding to now jump right in.
I think the amount of snark that doctors get away with is pretty illustrative of the low social standing that people in technology have.

If you told a doctor "my body hurts" and refused to clarify, you would almost certainly get some sort of snark. Nobody thinks poorly of doctors because of this though, while people in technology are caricatured endlessly in popular media for it.

The most you see that being done for doctors in media is probably House who is a complete asshole junky with vague personality disorders... but he's right dammit! The popular depictions of people in technology almost without fail leave of the "but he's right" and instead go with "his dweebish mind missed the obvious: we just had to [shoot|kick|shove] the computer."
good question! The issue is that everyone uses git, so it's not correlated with any other commands.
I'll try to scrape it if you want.

I'm currently working on a project to scrape property tax data from every country in the US, and will be providing it for free via a JSON API and with an Openstreetmap mashup for visualization.
What if it turns out that each is worse than the last?
> It doesn't seem like I can reply to smtddr's sibling comment here (probably nested too deep?).

OT technical note.

The reason you do not see a "reply" link is because you viewed the comment within X minutes of its posting. HN disables the reply link for that period. However, if you click on the permalink (the "link" text), you will still get a usable text box for replying.

My strategy is generally to do this, but sometimes I actually just refresh to pick up any new contextual comments.
... and said character was, indeed, a bastard.

I think you may just have had a <whoosh /> moment :)
>>If its your first time using Linux I would stick with something that is familiar to a Windows user, Mint.

This 100%.

I started out with Madriva after being a lifelong MS user. It was a steep learning curve. I had to learn how to compile and install stuff from source. While not a bad thing to learn, for a Windows user, it was totally foreign to me.

After several years enjoying Mandriva I switched over to Mint and thought, "Good lord, where have you been my whole life!?" It was like night and day. I actually got a lot more comfortable using terminal with Mint then I ever was with Mandriva. I also switched over to Gnome from KDE and think its much better than KDE.
The most interesting shells I've seen have been done via the htaccess file.

Here is an example: https://github.com/wireghoul/htshells/blob/master/shell/mod_...
>> I’ve owned a car for most of my adult life and they’re a mystery to me.

Right. But you bought a car to drive places, not because you like taking them apart or 'programming' them. You probably bought a computer for the latter.
that would be rather costly to develop.
Who isn't talking about capability? The claim was "Everyone should learn how to change the oil in their car, though.", not "Everyone should change the oil in their car, though."

The inability to change your oil is frightening on the same level as the inability to connect yourself to wifi. I don't give a shit if you get your oil changed at the shop, or if your work computer automagically connects to corporate wifi out of the box, but you should be able to do either yourself.
Super glad that this is on the frontpage. Dashboard design is probably the single biggest thing that analytics companies overlook when building product. It took us nearly 5 iterations to get our dashboard to a decent point.

What's worst is when offering free trials of an analytics product and then realizing that all freemium customers engage with a dashboard once, and then dropoff forever. Event tracking and various stages of a/b testing can be dangerous because they steer engineers to local minimums in designing a product.

Having a logical understanding of every element of the dashboard is the best way to approach the design.

Great post, we need more resources like this out there.
Worth noting that the first country I ever saw a public display of military-style force by the police (APCs rolling around in public, and cops carrying SMGs and assault rifles) was Spain, in 1992. On a recent trip through Germany I saw another APC emblazoned with police insignia rolling around the airport.

By way of comparison, US cops generally walk around only with sidearms - rifles and shotguns are left in the trunk or car and aren't pulled out in most encounters. Similarly, APCs / armored cars are not used for patrol by most departments, but called out for specific tasks.

The idea that this is a strictly American thing is ridiculous...
It's easier and saner to just ignore every defense the government has to say about surveillance. It's all lies and reading the media's wrapper around bullshit is time consuming.
I partly disagree for the following reasons:

1) If the programmer is good the computer COULD show prejudices. It's not an implication. I can be a racist bigot, but if I'm a good programmer I will not prevent login for the users 晴輝, Abd al-Aziz or 湘. I can build a watermill and it will not have prejudice, it will just do a job.

2) The programs running in such big companies are peer reviewed, so the inner workings are known and checked by at least two people. You cannot do that to human beings. You don't know what they are ultimately trying to do AND you cannot have at least two people checking on them. If now you're thinking of parents, remember that they have a limited influence on a person.

3) Random prejudice could still work, just like random noise, but I still disagree on the prejudice part.
> “Trying to change a law to allow very, very rich people to go a lot faster than less rich people over the same airspace—it’s not the easiest one to justify,”

But it's very likely that the price will be paid for the representatives to vote for it. I could see it being rolled into a bill meant to eliminate some red tape for commercial space entrepreneurs. (And tha would be a good thing n the whole.)

EDIT: Fuel costs made the Concorde uneconomical. Is there a way we can eventually get around this? What about using beamed power to launch vehicles above the atmosphere on ballistic trajectories? There would be tremendous infrastructure and R&D costs up front, but eventually, such a system would blow way aircraft for very high speed personnel and package transport over long distances.
Right, but usually what ends up happening is that the user ends up repeating (in increasing frustration) that the computer is broken/the internet is down. Eventually, IT people learn to ignore user feedback because they don't know what they're doing--which increases speed of resolution but ultimately is a bad idea.

Consider how doctors react to patients that willfully refuse to give useful feedback--talk to any paramedic, for example.

In fact, IT workers are very much like paramedics: they sit around all day being bored except for bouts of panic brought on usually by failure to take preventative measures.
> In none of these instances did anyone attempt to seek out knowledge. They were looking for a solution. If they had said "how do I [get on the network|reinstall the OS|rip this file off YouTube]?" then it would be a lot easier for me to dismiss him as a curmudgeonly holier-than-thou IT guy.

Still inexcusable, especially as an educator. Here's what I would of done:

"Oh you can't connect to the internet? Watch this. See the little icon at the top that looks like ripples going up? This one? That's the hub for any wireless networking connection - just click it and pick an option. Each of those options is a network to connect to. The ones with little locks next to them means you need a password to connect. If you're ever having internet problems on your laptop, just check this icon out and see if you're connected." Then fix the situation for them. You still offered a solution, and they'll probably never come to you for help with that again - and whenever they hear a friend, they'll repeat it. It's really not complicated to explain AND fix the problem at the same time.
Yes, it's mentioned in the linked page.
There are an almost unlimited number of things to figure out in modern life. IMO, it's not reasonable to judge someone for selecting which ones are most important to them. The important thing is to know it is possible if you had to -- it's just persistence.

That said, if you wanted to pick one thing, computers probably have the lowest cost-to-benefit ratio of figuring stuff out, at least at the proxy-settings level of detail. I know how to change the oil in my car, but I can't do it much cheaper than the nine minute lube down the street, and it takes me four times as long.
The title is better phrased as "should you worry that lots of people can't use computers?". Because of the obvious "no" response. No, you shouldn't worry.

We've had computers for two generations now and the existence of people who can't use them hasn't made the world stop turning. People who do not understand things in general have always existed. People who make decisions about things they don't understand. Politicians who make decisions about things they don't understand. Always has been, always will be. Trying to educate them is a futile effort, we're better off trying to find ways to get what we want or route around the damage. I would of course prefer it if that wasn't the case, but it's like wanting pi to be exactly 3.

Think of it like driving a car. I cannot drive a car. I have a license, I have taken classes, I have put in effort, but it's just too complicated and unnatural for me; and I deem myself too dangerously inept to drive. To commute, I ride my bike, take public transport or pay other people to drive me. Same with computers - if you can't use them, either do your job without one, or pay someone to do stuff for you.

You'd find it easier to make the earth spin in reverse than to make sure everyone knows how to use a computer.
Classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog situation. What is now somehow acceptable, would have been outrageous a dozen years ago.

It might have stirred some opposition in August of 2001, but by September of 2001 people were pretty united in the desire to punish the perpetrators of 9/11 by any available means.
Why were you shocked? He was opposed to the Iraq war, but it became clear very early on in his presidency and even during his original candidacy that his opposition was to that war specifically, and not based on some broader liberal foreign policy views. Tellingly, his response to "what would you have done?" was always "doubled-down on Afghanistan and hunted down Osama bin Laden." I distinctly remember him talking about this before he was elected, because I remember initially disliking him until I heard his strong foreign policy stance. Given that expectation, I can't say anything about his presidency (e.g. drone strikes) has surprised me (other than the general ineptitude of his DOJ--I expected a lawyer to have a better handle on that).
It's because everyone says "time is money" but not one single person actually believes it. Mechanics make tangible shit happen, sometimes using new parts, etc. Software isn't tangible.
A bunch of libertarians are fond of saying that each president eventually makes you nostalgic for the last one.

EDIT: It was actually Calvin Trillin, but I read it on a libertarian blog: http://archive.mises.org/16107/bushs-huge-budget-numbers-bla...
Ubuntu ships Firefox with an AppArmor profile, although it appears that it is disabled by default (presumably for the same reason you give).
"There is such breathtaking depth and heartbreaking beauty in this ancient art form. How ironic that people dismiss mathematics as the antithesis of creativity. They are missing out on an art form older than any book, more profound than any poem, and more abstract than any abstract. And it is school that has done this! What a sad endless cycle of innocent teachers inflicting damage upon innocent students. We could all be having so much more fun."

As a Mathematician I've always identified as a creative person, yet struggle to convince "artsy" persons that what I do is creative. As soon as I utter the word math they convulse and shutter as if they were afflicted with a PTSD flashback. I try explaining what the idea involves and draw a diagram or three, but all they do is just nod and say "yeah, yup, okay.." Are the ideas of math that inaccessible to the general population when compared to a work of Art?
Just preordered three of these for various projects I have in mind/that could take advantage of this, awesome work!
Do you have any idea when more details on the SDK/API will be available?
It's a very good argument, because the suggestion that we've abandoned some golden age of individual liberty in the US is not rooted in fact. The individual has far more standing in conflict with the state than used to be the case.
maybe it shouldn't have been "techno dad to the rescue", but rather "dad spending a moment with his kids showing them how to setup a raspberry pi/their xbox/etc.".

More than this, I think that in part it's necessary to allow the kids to try and fail before assisting them. I'm not sure that showing and explaining to them how to perform a task from start to finish is much more effective than solving the problem behind a closed door, at least in terms of retention. What's really effective is if they can make an attempt to solve the issue, and then get the solution. Unfortunately, my experience is that not very many parents take this approach, because it includes failure as part of the learning process--and not many parents like to watch their kids fail. I've even seen some parents condemned for telling their kids to go and try it themselves before they provide help--some parents regard this as some kind of neglect.

The goal is to have the kid get 90% of the way there (or however close they're capable) before closing the gap and assisting them with the remaining 10% that they aren't able to get on their own. Part of the issue is that in the eye of the learner (and an observer) is that 0% of the way there and 90% of the way there feel the same. Both of them amount to "I can't do it and had to ask for help." But if you've gotten 90% of the way to a solution yourself, it's much easier to understand when the final (and hardest) 10% is demonstrated for you, and odds are you'll retain at least part of that. Whereas if 100% of the task is done for you, you'll frequently retain none of the solution, even if the solution is accompanied by a lengthy explanation.

In school, I found that I learned most effectively when I attempted the assigned homework before the related material was covered in class. I tried, I failed at a lot of things, and when the lecture came up, I knew what information to look for and what questions to ask. Failure is a critical part of the learning process--it's unfortunate that many people try to avoid failure rather than embrace it.
Not only that, but the compatibility can be guaranteed by seeding the cells to be printed from your own stem cells.
I thought someone might bring this up. This still isn't comparable to altering the actual content of your mail. The ads, though displayed with all of your genuine mail, are still discreet items and are noninvasive. This type of advertising is quite similar classic snail mail, where junk mail is mixed in with regular mail.
I Shop Therefore I Am
The current big civilian aircrafts are all still mainly follow aerodynamics introduced by B-47. Conceptual models like one referred by parent are trying to break the spell, yet it doesn't seem to be happening any time soon unfortunately.
I'm downvoted, yet there's no evidence this meeting produced anything substantive, or was anything but a PR move by the president.

Vague statements about "dialogue" regarding a secret meeting, and people actually take this seriously? It's ridiculous.