Hacker News Reader

rando832on Firefox now only available via snap on Ubuntu

Try abrowser from the Trisquel apt repo. It is a firefox rebuild with a few tweaks for privacy.

rando832on Software Freedom Conservancy files GPL lawsuit against Vizio

Gplv2 violations are widespread, we need much much more enforcement and more copyleft software, and this could be a huge win. Free software's main purpose should not be to be proprietarized, too much of it now is a group effort among companies to more efficiently lure users to trade their freedom for functionality.

rando832on Why FSF Endorsing PureOS Matters

Your quote is misleading. There are a list of reasons on that page, you imply it's just that one reason.

> So shipping free software isn't even enough for admission to the FSFs special club.

If you're free is designed to "lead others to make use of" nonfree software, then of course not: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

rando832on Why FSF Endorsing PureOS Matters

> It's also unclear to me what the distinction is between this part of the criteria and the RYF certification.

Ya, you are confused.

The PureOS endorsement is about a distro you can download and put on a computer (the distro doesn't include a bios or related firmware).

RYF is about all the software that comes on a computer/device, and the website you use to buy it, it's much more expansive.

So, Purism's computers are not RYF certified, but they come with a distro that is fully free (the disto does not include some nonfree firmware that comes on Purism's computers).

rando832on Why FSF Endorsing PureOS Matters

Just no. Your link is about coreboot. The FSF endorsement is of PureOS (does not contain coreboot).

rando832on The terms of the AGPL are pretty easy to comply with

And Microsoft said all GPL was a cancer and unamerican and viral and disallowed it from about 50k engineer's computers due to "legal risk of GPL virality", and this was when they were by far the biggest software company. Wait, they lied? It was all FUD and really about threatening their business model. They changed their policies and actually said publicly they were wrong. Is it so hard to believe?

rando832on The terms of the AGPL are pretty easy to comply with

The "scripts to control" clause as you say is in all versions of the GPL, exactly the same in GPLv3, and slightly different I presume in GPLv2. It has been tested in court, and its been found to not be expansive like the fud you are spreading.

rando832on Books I recommend to my software engineering students

"The Design of Everyday Things", I would consider the digital versions to be

Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace

http://codev2.cc/

and

Free Software Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman

https://shop.fsf.org/books-docs/free-software-free-society-s...

rando832on In Defense of Richard Stallman

So, basically, exactly what the article says, a big nothing. The plants thing is stupid, rms doesn't hate plants. Sarah Mei appears to have no special reason to hate rms, shes a well known person who is extremely negative about anyone in software who's said anything offensive, including Linus, etc.

rando832on In Defense of Richard Stallman

This story has obvious falsehoods and as far as I can tell, is totally false or about the wrong person.

1. As far as I can tell, he was never on the board of VA Linux.

2. RMS was never married. https://www.quora.com/Is-Richard-Stallman-married

3. It is a widely known that if anyone ever associates RMS with "open source", he will interject to say that he vehemently disagrees with open source and had nothing to do with its creation. The fireball guy who posted this story, clearly knows very little of RMS to post this without mentioning the fact that this part absolutely is false.

4. He dislikes the word "open" in general, and would never ever use it to describe anything he was involved in. Again, key fact that is clearly false.

5. RMS does not usually have bad hygiene.

6. One of the people who coined "open source" was involved with VA Linux, his name was Eric S Raymond. Perhaps this this is about him.

rando832on 1Password Travel Mode: Protect your data when crossing borders

> the border agent doesn't care if the data is technically in the cloud

In reality, they do. They are not asking you for every password you know and access to all the remote systems you have access to, and any that you can get access to if you ask someone, etc, etc.

rando832on Farmers look for ways to circumvent tractor software locks

Also, if it's built on open source as he says, that likely means linux, and tons of code that John Deer is not reviewing, so... trust you that john deer needs to protect farmers from letting people fix the code THEY WROTE. lol.

rando832on Farmers look for ways to circumvent tractor software locks

> If a team of hundred of engineers struggle with their codebase internally, Joe Farmer isn't going to have a fucking clue how to repair their software correctly.

> But trust me on this, locking this down is a very good idea.

Joe Farmer may not know, but Joe farmer has "the internet", and ability to pay an independent software engineer. And people would absolutely find and fix bugs that john deer is missing.

Honestly, your argument sounds so ridiculous, it sounds like saying "it's to protect the children from terrorism."

rando832on Airlines Make More Money Selling Miles Than Seats

> What a customer gets usually is something like 7 miles per dollar. Consumer website estimate[1] that in the best of case, a mile is equal to ~$0.01, so they're also saving money there.

Your math is way off. If it's 7 miles per dollar spent on the card, that is 7% back by your math, compared to 1-2% cashback, this conflicts with "they're also saving money there."

With that math, you're saying that it's a great deal for the consumer. Perhaps the other things you mentioned still add up to being in the airlines favor, but whats really going on?

rando832on Fossjobs: A website for free and open-source software jobs

rando832on New GitHub Terms of Service require removing many open-source works

No, your comment is complete FUD. Even a cursory skim of that blog post, you can see it's about a completely different issue in the TOS and does not discuss the issues this post is about at all.

rando832on Python moved to GitHub

I used gerrit and did not utterly despised it. Hi.

rando832on Show HN: Command Line Challenge

Oh ya, I shouldn't have said answer, because uniq is not a way to the answer, just something I naturally reached for while trying to figure out an answer.

rando832on Show HN: Command Line Challenge

Interestingly, locale can change one answer.

with LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8,

sort faces.txt | uniq -c

5 (◕‿◕)

uniq treats (︺︹︺) as equal to (◕‿◕).

Copied the file to my machine to test.

rando832on Free Software Foundation Priority Projects

They are actively working on that. Their other sites are much better, see gnu.org and defectivebydesign.org.

rando832on NeverSSL

Words get to have more than one meaning. Your comment is not made from a cow, but there's nothing wrong with calling it bs.

rando832on Hiring via referrals isn't great for diversity

"any sort of policy based on race is racist." So you cannot identify racism without being a racist. And is the no race policy then racist itself, by being about race? No, this does not work as a blanket statement. Btw, this kind of message of "don't talk about it" has a long history of being pushed by racist people. Perhaps we should focus on race less, but that is different.

rando832on Apache Performance: Disable .htaccess here's why

A little inaccurate, .htaccess is disabled by default (2.3.9 and later), so you do not need "AllowOverride None" unless it's enabled somewhere else.

rando832on Dear Matt Mullenweg: An Open Letter from Wix.com’s CEO Avishai Abrahami

It has been tested in court. Not all aspects, but there is no question as to whether it is enforceable.

rando832on Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_ingredient

"An active ingredient (AI) is the ingredient in a pharmaceutical drug that is biologically active. " Does it also reduce the amount of rainbows and unicorns? Your own wikipedia link does not say eating garlic is helpful to humans.

rando832on Supercharging Style Transfer

> Notice how the transferred images have none of the power of the originals.

Partly because they are like 200x200 pixel images. There is no power in the original either that way. And I've been seen a ton of these posts like "look at these beautiful images", and the images are absolutely tiny. It's really ridiculous and annoying.

rando832on Using Rowhammer bitflips to root Android phones

> The number of phone users who care about getting a root shell for their own use is vanishingly small

Only a very small number of people care about how /any/ individual piece of technology could be improved, they have have other things to think about. That is a not a valid argument. It would be better to have it by some other means to get root, but it's not as simple as you make it out. Show a user 2 otherwise identical phones, explain that on one phone, they could do things like tethering, and on the other phone, it's restricted because they can't get root, they will choose the one where they can get root.

rando832on What has happened down here is the winds have changed

> Keep in mind that data can always be anonymized.

No it can't. Some data can be anonymized, some can't.

rando832on Show HN: TagSpaces – An open source personal data manager

You expect to type PRO and have people know what your talking about? I certainly don't, and unless you are talking about the wikipedia entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRO_%28category_theory%29, which it doesn't sound like, I don't think it's reasonable.