skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What makes distributions different are mainly the package manager and the packages in the repositories.

Your example with Fedora and Ubuntu is a bad one because they use different package managers. Fedora uses yum and Ubuntu uses apt. This is one of the biggest differences that two distributions can have. They are different enough people get advice to stick to one and build some experience with it. If a person is using Debian on the servers, then he better stick to Ubuntu or Mint as a desktop (if he uses Linux as a desktop at all). On the other hand CentOS users are better off with Fedora or OpenSUSE.

The difference between Debian, Ubuntu and Mint is more subtle but they are still different. For one they are maintained by different people. One could argue that Xubuntu and Ubuntu are also maintained by different people which is true for the Desktop Environments, but it is also true that the kernel of both is maintained by the same people and they use the same kernel at any given time.

Another one is that Ubuntu and Xubuntu have exactly the same repositories for a given release. Mint is based on the repositories of Ubuntu and many (most) packages are the exactly the same, but then Mint has some extra packages specific to their distro.

As a result most of the time you can follow a 14.04 guide and apply it to Mint 17 and everything will be OK but there is the occasional difference.
Oh shit. I had two articles published in it last year. What does that make me?!

On a LUG mailing list I belong to we started using the term "command line extremist". I rather like it.
I briefly met a guy who worked for US intelligence (can't remember specifics). I asked him about the NSA. First, he told me he couldn't say much. Then he said "Well I don't wanna brag, but the NSA really has caught a lot of terrorists, and is way more competent than the media makes them out to be." This leads me to believe that either: all these press articles paint a distorted picture; or the level of rationalization is pretty high.
Well I think soon in every firework show we will see 50 of those flying around and disturbing the view...
Its like people that take Ipads to concerts - screw all the people behind me, at least I will have a great recording!
>This is the reason no one uses Mac OS X for anything serious.

Nice work dismissing the work that tens of millions of people do every day.

That said, SMB and external monitor support work fine for me and everyone in our company (few hundred Macs).
I switched to Xubuntu and have grown to love XFCE more than I loved Gnome2. Best features: ability to script and directly hack configuration settings, basic features for window tiling. With scripts I can fully configure a dev box with a single command.
Hell, I even switched to Windows 7 for a while, back when Fedora came only with Gnome3. It didn't help, that at the time the Linux kernel also had some general problems with power consumption.

By now, Gnome 3 is actually quite good, but still uses more power than MATE.

Cinnamon is slow and buggy as hell. Unity is just slow.

XFCE has become quite good, but still can't handle docking (or un/plugging an external monitor) correctly. KDE neither (plus I don't like the IMHO horrible interface).

So even after many years and years, Gnome2/MATE is still - IMHO - the best desktop in Linuxland (and I also like it more than Windows 7, and a lot more than Mac OS; back in the day I switched from Mac OS 10.4 to Ubuntu). It's not about classic - it's about functionality, stability, performance, configurability. But mostly that it just works and does everything the way you expect.

Interesting that you liked the old Ubuntu colors. I liked them much better than the current ones, but still considered them quite ugly compared to the typical blue desktops of Windows, Mac OS or Fedora.
I absolutely agree with you and, in fact, I'm a user of Unity who doesn't hate it and has moved on from Gnome (which I didn't hate either). Sure there's stuff I don't like about Unity, but no deal breakers.

That said, it's wonderful that Free and Open Source software has a place for conservative diehards, even if I'm not one of them.

PS: disclaimer: I was a user of KDE from the good old days who abandoned ship when KDE 4 got weird :)
What the author calls a 'system', I think of as my 'process', but same thing really. Basically: trying to be in the moment and concentrate on one thing at a time.

Best take away: "Positive attitude - exercise, food, and sleep. Avoid overexposure to depressing news, music, movies, etc."
You are certainly entitled to your opinion. At my company we use Mint Mate on all desktops. It's clean, simple, works great, and doesn't require training for employees who have never used Linux.
I've used AutoIt fairly heavily in the past and can say from experience that, in many ways, it is indeed very convenient for rapid Windows development.

Still, to more directly answer the "question" presented in the article title, I'd say that there is no connection between AutoIt and malware -- at least no more than any other malware authors' languages of choice. It's unfortunate for legitimate developers that malware authors (unsurprisingly) find the convenience to work for them as well. That doesn't excuse anti-malware vendors for labeling executables as malware just because they were developed using AutoIt. The UPX packing that comes out-of-the-box with the AutoIt "compiler" doesn't help either -- it's like a one-two combo for false-positives, since anti-malware software also frequently get tripped up by EXE packers like UPX.

AutoIt-based stuff that I've distributed in the past have fallen victim to AutoIt+UPX false-positives, and it's teeth-grindingly annoying for your stuff to be perfectly fine for a long stretch of time, only to find people knocking on your e-door the next day grilling you about distributing malware just because the anti-malware vendors updated their signatures to block AutoIt -- again.
Wasn't one of end goals to plant a huge forest? I'd love to know if he chased that dream at all. "How to get rich" was a fantastic book, and one that I recommend to others frequently.
Would Earth Look Like A Habitable Planet From Afar?
Sure. And I don't know anyone who would prioritise fixing DTrace who a handful of people in the world care about over refreshing the look and feel which affects everyone.
Show HN: Reddit.gallery - a fork of reddit.tv
Detailed Course on Achieving the Tyndall Effect by PS Skills
Yeah, but it's hosted on Medium, so it looks beautiful and weighty. (scnr)
The Tutorial of a Textured Icon
That's rediculous. You're recommending that people stick with old versions that are riddled with known vulnerabilities. There are some great lightweight modern OS's, like CrunchBang and Lubuntu that work well on old hardware.
Can we go back to exactly 365 days ago? I feel like this is just when this shit was heating up. I want to go back and read all the people on the Top 100 list who were bending over backward to defend the government and tech companies.

Actually, the engineer from Google, I'd love to see him. He stuck his neck out so far, so funny.
Yes, but the mean number of times was less than 1.5, with maximum 4 if you exclude that outlier. The vast majority of cases are perfectly compatible with curiosity, a scenario the paper ignored completely, and which could have been at least partially addressed simply by asking participants why they pressed the button.

This is an OK study, sexed up in a very cynical and ignorant way.
I agree, LXDE has never looked very sophisticated. I'm curious what the merger brings (LXDE+RazorQt -> LXQt).

If you're not too starved on memory, I found MATE a better alternative compared to XFCE, almost the same performance, but worked a bit better. But YMMV. MATE doesn't seem to have a working window-snap (Winkey+left/right), but XFCE doesn't really work with hot-plugging external monitors.
Thanks for the interesting post, as I mentioned in the first post I have a fascination for 19th and 20th century history and the parallels to some of it are horribly stark (so stark in fact I can't believe that the people in power haven't spotted them which leaves me with "this is what they want").

Secret courts, no right to due process, no right to face your accuser, the presumption of guilt on political grounds, secret warrants, an out of control security apparatus, extra judicial killings, curtailing on the right to free protest, right to free speech...

Thanks to our reliance on modern communications and technology the state apparatus can assemble data warehouses that the most optimistic of STASI operatives wouldn't have even dreamed possible and we seem to be sleep walking into a police state more pervasive and insidious than anything we've ever seen.

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever."
Optimal Layout, another OSX window manager
Why must people continue to create new obsessions for me...
Add a webcam and turn it into an art installation :)
To the NSA, the course of society is what the government wants.
I wished they recorded audio (or maybe it's unfixably loud).
I'd really like to switch to a Debian-based system, but ALL Debian-based distros seem to have TERRIBLE battery life, whereas Mint 17 has an excellent one (better than Arch/Manjaro or Fedora and on par with Windows 7). Sigh. And yes, I'm using powertop. Without it, Linux battery life is horrible.
The more I think about this and reread it, the more smug and self-serving it sounds, and the more difficult it becomes to believe that this manages to pass for a gem of wisdom and sage advice. It is nothing but a negative stereotype of people with high IQs as being essentially lazy and entitled. What motive is there to stereotype people with high intelligence? It sounds like sour grapes. Couldn't it be true, though? The history of similar stereotypes isn't good; lazy and entitled is one of the all-time most popular stereotypes of any despised out-group, and I suspect it hasn't been the go-to slander because it has a superior likelihood of turning out to be true and defensible. Here's a one-word rebuttal: doctors. We adopt stereotyped beliefs simply because of how they make us feel. Ordinarily, intelligent people would seem to make a poor target, because it's a group that, by definition, is distinguished by superiority, having as its sole determinant a very high IQ. It's not so easy to identify who around you might be in this group, and to attack it, you would seem to have to admit being less intelligent. The built-in requirement to demean your own intelligence along the way could almost just poison any possible benefit of stereotyping. But -- I'm not familiar with the name Max Klein, and it's such a combination of common names that it's almost ideal for being impervious to Google. From context and clues, though, I gather that this person must have achieved some amount of fame due to some startup-related achievement. I speculated in another comment that if anything could confer a license to feel superior to practically anyone, it would be having a successful startup. Who wouldn't want one, and by virtue of having it, in a way you are smarter than PhDs and Nobel Prize winners. The source largely makes no difference, though. You can judge a piece of writing completely on its own merits. This particular piece of writing falls apart under closer examination.
NeoVim Newsletter Issue #2
I'm sure that are DE's that work well with less than 512MB of RAM, but there aren't any modern web browsers that do. They're going to put 512MB as a requirement no matter what the DE itself requires.
Ruining the fun for everyone of us :(.

Seriously, I dislike this trend of making everything a closed and encrypted black box accessible only through official channels (that will disappear in 3 years anyway) for reasons mostly related to money-making and not really security. I think this is will, if continued, slow down the rate of technological progress and development of new ideas.

To quote pg,

"It is by poking about inside current technology that hackers get ideas for the next generation. No thanks, intellectual homeowners may say, we don't need any outside help. But they're wrong. The next generation of computer technology has often—perhaps more often than not—been developed by outsiders."

http://paulgraham.com/gba.html
but there is also this: http://www.spring.org.uk/2014/07/the-10000-hours-myth-practi...
I think you're missing the point. It's common practice to sunset something. Apple, Google, Microsoft do it all the time. The fact is the support for some version of OSX has been deprecated and not supported any more. What are those folk to do?

Ubuntu 12.04, which has a version of Gnome classic, is still supported until 2017 (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases). If someone is running hardware past this date, well, they are going to be on their own. That's life. That's software.
When beliefs and facts collide
Right, it's like when those Unix luddites refused to upgrade to OS/2 or even DOS. Wake up, people! It's called progress!
Your point on server-side business logic is spot on. I feel somewhat spoiled now after working on isomorphic JavaScript: any time I need to add rules to a legacy application that requires me to write the same code in two languages I get quite frustrated. DRY, what?

And to your list of isomorphic view frameworks I'd add React [0], which allows you to render server-side with almost no additional effort.

[0]: https://facebook.github.com/react
Totally agree. One of the best (and most honest) books on the subject I've ever read.
FYI these are compiled for 64bit
Anyone know where this was shot?
The secret of effective motivation
"What makes distributions different are mainly the package manager and the packages in the repositories."

...and the packaging/updating philosophy, the packaging/defaults, the configurability. How they handle your hardware (hotplugging printers, monitors, mice). Batteries included or not. Power management.

E.g. Fedora always uses the latest upstream packages and doesn't patch them very much. Debian/Ubuntu/Mint use stable packages and patch them heavily. Many years ago one such patch in the (stable) Ubuntu kernel broke my (officially supported) file system, causing data loss. OTOH, Fedora can be a bit harsh to use for newbies.
Having one small team in a 6 figure sized organization using mongo doesn't mean a single thing, but makes your statement true, which is how most of these flagship customers are able to be advertised.
I think part of the problem is that buggy code that compiles produces instant gratification. You see results, even if incomplete. Maybe down the road you'll reach a dead-end due to a problem you didn't foresee, and the buggy code didn't help you find it because it compiled anyway, and you didn't have to think too hard about all cases or about the structure of the problem. And then it may be too late and you'll have to throw everything away and start from scratch.

But in the meantime, you get the feeling you're making progress, even if you're not. I think that's the psychology of the matter.

I'm a Haskell fan (and still a newbie, unfortunately) and I sometimes fall prey to this feeling.
In my experience the vast majority of people find explicit loops easier to understand. Thinking in terms of a function that calls itself is a struggle for most people. FP advocates that really care about language adoption should be more willing to recognize that this is a hurdle and not wave it away as a personal preference, IMO.
Regarding the first point… what's the point really? Either you render it on the client, or you render it on the server, then client couldn't care less what did you use to render it as long as it gets HTML it wanted. If you feel the need to render something in both places I feel that you have some seriously overcomplicated architecture.

Regarding the second point: if the client modifies the document through the API calls, who cares what technology is used to implement those API methods?
Game Center has always been kind of weird. Is it done in a location other than Cupertino perhaps?
Surveillance cams are part of the setup ;) They're old, modified Android phones, actually.
The Power of the Digi-Comp II: My First Conscious Paperlet (2014)
It also makes you wonder what those "terrorists" had actually done to warrant being captured.
I think those assumptions are not supported by the available evidence[1], and that the authors they know this. Who cares what the NSA says? I'm looking at the same thing the authors are presenting and drawing different conclusions.

[1] Including the abundance of evidence already available about XKEYSCORE.
The flaw in the "thought control" premise is that the NSA never intended their monitoring to be revealed, so you'd never restrict your thoughts.

Unless... Snowden is an NSA operation to subtly begin exerting thought control! Brilliant! Now that I think about it, "Snowden" even sounds like a codename for an NSA operation.
The boss I'm talking about is a special case and one-of-a-kind as far as I know. He also happens to be foreign-born and from a country that I don't know much about. But he admitted once that his friends had nick-named him Eeyore on account of his not-so-sunny disposition, so I think being obnoxious was/is a cross he has to bear alone.

I'm too far removed from corporate culture right now to really feel what you're saying. But Zed Shaw seemed to have similar gripes and he is very funny. I'm sure you know of him, but if not, look him up.
I'm so bummed that there isn't an audible version of his books available in the United States. Or am I wrong about that?
Loved his book. This gem stands out for me:

Should you find yourself unable to measure up to at-least one of the following below, you will never be rich.

1. If you are unwilling to fail, sometimes publicly, and even catastrophically, you stand little chance of ever getting rich.

2. If you care what the neighbours think, you will never get rich.

3. If you cannot bear the thought of causing worry to your family, spouse or lover while you plough a lonely, dangerous road rather than taking the safe option of a regular job, you will never get rich.

4. If you have artistic inclinations and fear that the search for wealth will coarsen such talents, you will never get rich. (Because your fear, in this instance, is well justified.)

5. If you are not prepared to work longer hours than almost anyone you know, despite the jibes of colleagues and friends, you are unlikely to get rich.

6. If you cannot convince yourself that you are “good enough” to be rich, you will never get rich.

7. If you cannot treat your quest to get rich as a game, you will never be rich.
the study hinges on whether the researchers who worked on it, designing it and completing many trials over time, writing it up and getting it published, on whether they thought of something that you just thought of? that the unpleasant shock had to be unpleasant?

REALLY? you really think they missed that?
Elinks or links2 is quite servicable.
Their thoughts were certainly around "why did they put that button here?", and "will it really work like the first time again?"

Because well, they were placed in a room where they could shock themselves. Completely out of the ordinary does not describe the setup well enough.
Show HN: Find out what they really think about you!
Parking sucks, let's fix it
I feel very sad reading this. I first found Felix in "How to get rich". It was even better than I expected it would be. Few books have felt so honest. He wrote that he had nothing to gain from the book, as he was already rich. I think this was true.

I'm taking a different route to entrepreneurship and riches than he did (lower goal, far less struggle) but much of what he wrote rang true for my situation, too.

Throughout "how to get rich" he mentioned his poetry, which is what he devoted his life too after he gave up booze, drugs and mistresses. I've never got into poetry, but wanted to. So I picked up a book.

It was good. I picked up another book, and enjoyed that too. And what's more, now I get more enjoyment out of other poems. I'm still learning, but he's changed how I appreciate a major branch of literature.

And now he's dead. I can never thank him for any of that. I had intended to write him. Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today. That was a lesson hard learned for him, pervasive in his book and poetry. It's trite, but it's so very true. We all have so little time.

This poem fells apropos. I suspect that, though he died fairly young, he is glad to have avoided this fate:

http://www.felixdennis.com/poetry/dementia/

-------------------

How to get rich: http://www.amazon.com/How-Get-Rich-Greatest-Entrepreneurs/dp...

The first of his poetry books I read:

http://www.amazon.com/Tales-From-Woods-audio-CD/dp/009193767...
There are still days when I miss fvwm. Not because it was that great, but because I used it for so long that my fingers still remember the keyboard shortcuts I configured. But I moved to OSX and just had to adapt. I guess moving on isn't always the most important thing, but stay productive. If that mean staying with some old software I'm all for it.
Interesting, I wondered if anyone else was playing with XFCE config this way. I have the important parts of my .config/xfce4 folder under git and replicated across 3 machines, which a branch for dual-screen tweaks on the desktop, etc. etc. I thought it was so cool that you can just figure this stuff out and get on with it!
ah, i wouldn't know, i prefer a desktop. i have been looking at other rolling distros, though. how did you like manjaro other than that?
Not free at all, that's the reason for the Kallithea fork. When someone attempted to use Rhodecode apparently under the free promises, they got lawsuit threats:

https://github.com/moparisthebest/unlimit-code/blob/master/r...
Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so

Well for a start that isn't true... And JK Rowling is a perfect example of it.
In my experience, the vast majority of people do not learn a functional language to the point where they are productive in it. My hypothesis is that the correlation between people who finding explicit loops easier to understand and people who do not learn functional languages to the point where they are productive is evidence of causation.
The Hacker Who Saved Thirty Million Lives
Plants Can Hear Themselves Being Eaten
Because it does hg. It's a free fork of Rhodecode, which has freedom issues:

https://github.com/moparisthebest/unlimit-code/blob/master/r...

Rhodecode started as hg-only and then added git when it seemed inevitable, but for those of us who still prefer hg, Rhodecode was the only thing we could use until the devs went crazy.
>tens of millions of people work on OSX

And what are you smoking?

I don't expect hacker Jews to criticize apple, but the new icons are shit just like iOS 7.

They have no taste, generic, psuedo "flat", bright shitty colors.

It's a joke, Linux has better icon packs as long as you don't have a retina display which still is in gimmick mode anyway.

sigh There is no direction at Apple anymore, they don't know what's cool. They are all too middle aged and content to make anything revolutionary.

They need a rabbid 15 year old to tell them they are shit on a daily basis AKA Steve Jobs