That page claims to be docs for OpenSSL. Is that incorrect? If it actually is docs for OpenSSL and not for LibreSSL, where's the LibreSSL-specific docs gbrown_ was talking about?
I think you are deliberately missing the point of the last line. Of course free access to a wide variety of education is a good thing - no one is doubting that.
But gatekeeping recognition for that education behind a paywall ensures that we are judging students not solely on their ability, but also on the size of their wallet.
There is nothing "anti-human" about acknowledging that, in an educational era of plenty, our systems are still failing those without the means to pay.
I have nothing against acknowledging problems. That's how we fix them. What I take exception to is the sentiment embodied in that sentence.
The gatekeeping behind a paywall issue is not what I was referring to.
But since you bring it up, I don't think that the analysis is so simple.
For one, I agree that there has been an over-inflation in the cost of universities, at least in the US and the UK (less so in other countries).
This paired with the fact that such education is going down in quality, most of that money pays useless bureaucracy and committees and you cannot default on education debt is a serious issue worth considering.
On the other hand, I also think we have to consider other factors.
For one, people value more things that come with a cost. This has been shown in studies. I recommend on the topic, "Influence", by Cialdini, for example.
In fact, raising fees in the UK seems to have increased attendance (1), although data seems to be contradictory on this one (and that's why I think it's a hard problem)
Anecdotally I can also say that in my business people value more the material they pay for and are more likely to follow through. I know this to be the case for other businesses too.
We have always to pay attention to the fact that the cure might make things worse instead of better. This is often the case with this type of interventions.
For example, countries with higher gender equality actually increase gender differences instead of reducing them (2). No one expected that, but that is the result.
But would they provide resistance? As nice as the idea of a fully-free distro is, I have the impression that free distros have a minuscule userbase compared to their non-free counterparts. For an already niche distro, this sounds like a significant handicap.
If someone came along and offered a hardware-compatibility repo or redistribution, would the Guix community work with them, or would the relationship be more distant, or even adversarial?
I'm personally very interested in the project, and have no desire to poison the pure core of Guix, but I need my hardware to work.
We don't want to have discussions about non-free software on the project channels, because they really are off-topic. We won't do anything to sabotage third-party repositories (no matter what they might contain); in fact, we're working on implementing mechanisms to make it easier to load software from third-party channels.
But as a project following the Free System Distribution Guidelines (GNU FSDG) we will not recommend third-party channels providing proprietory software, nor would we want our project's communication channels (mailing list, IRC, etc) to be used to steer users to channels that provide non-free software.
There are a number of people who won't buy a micro USB cable unless the product has the name of their phone in the name. So you see the exact same product listed multiple times with different names.
If amazon would extend their car parts search functionality -- letting users put in their phone model and then giving a curated list of compatible devices, it would be awesome.
It works pretty well for car parts, although you're at the mercy of the seller to determine compatibility for less prominent things.
This is not what is being said - I will quote the parent commenter:
"Here it seems that an influence / behaviour change campaign could be waged relatively cheaply against a relatively small number of people, exist completely outside the normal rules for fact checking or veracity, and the majority of the population would have no idea about it."
This is talking about being "bubbled", and how different collections of people are seeing completely different things, and because both sides don't know what the other is looking at, they become alienated from each other.
Furthermore, there is another problem - while a singular lie can be countered, a thousand different lies told to a thousand different communities is much harder to defend against.
Essentially, all the benefits touted above apply here, but it is worth noting that Guix is a younger project. The author was originally a Nix dev, but found the DSL to be too awkward to use in practice, and opted to use Scheme through and through. Yes, Emacs bindings are available.
Also, Guix can now produce Dockerfiles, if that floats your boat:
The main thing that probably turns people off to Guix is that GuixSD specifically rejects any non-free software. While a noble goal, it leaves most people's hardware unusable.
The main allure to Nix/Guix is to be used for the internals of an OS. For example, NixOS is the most stable and maintainable system I have ever used, even though the documentation is absolute shit.
You don't need to fork the entire OS, though - just provide the relevant non-free packages on top of the regular OS.
Guix devs themselves have hinted that "adding impurity to a free OS is much easier than removing impurity from a non-free OS", so I suspect they may not be categorically opposed to the idea of non-free packages.
Do you use NixOS as a desktop OS? If so, what advantages do you find over something like Arch? I understand the repoducability from configuration files are often touted as a selling point, but I'm not reinstalling my OS regularly so I don't really see the advantage.
When I upgrade or (un)install a package, I get a completely clean fresh installed system. If upgrading my video driver broke my system, I can just pick the most recent version of my install from the bootloader. When I want to start writing code, I can use nix-shell to create an isolated environment with all the dependencies I need, and get to work, with one command.
At any moment, I know that my entire OS install is completely clean, devoid of any cruft, even if I have been installing and removing obscure software for months. I don't have a mess in /etc, in /usr/share, anywhere.
> I'm not reinstalling my OS regularly so I don't really see the advantage.
With NixOS, I'm never reinstalling my OS, because every update leaves me with a fresh new system, guaranteed.
Personally I run Arch on my desktops but NixOS on my servers. I mostly use Arch because of all the relatively uncommon stuff I occasionally use from the AUR (somehow I doubt STM32CubeMX or ESPtool will enter Nixpkgs any time soon), but I've occasionally ended up cursing that I couldn't do a Nix-style rollback when an update broke something important.
It's not Haskell, strictly speaking. There are some weird global state mutations in NixOS (I.e. the pkgs object) that aren't as intuitive as you'd like. Also, the novel file structure makes composing packages that aren't already built to do so quite difficult. Trying to get eclimd to work with emacs and eclipse was a giant pain.
I expect that your issue is more with the fact that there is a mega state object that contains almost everything - not that it is somehow global, which it isn't. You can't access it unless it is passed to you.
Why was the title changed? The old title was not great, but at least informed us that a) the article was about PaX/Grsec, and b) was trying to present another side to the story.
HN has replaced this with the title of an obscure Linux project, and an awkward and unhelpful metaphor - capitalisation kept, of course, so readers can wrongly assume that "Ark" is the name some piece of software. Yes, it's original, pure and untouched. No, it's not helpful, it's just worse in every way.
I understand that editorialising titles is a bad thing. But if a human is taking the time to make a judgement call on what is or is not editorialised, why not take a few extra minutes to create a more neutral title?
I really agree. Every time I notice that a title has been changed lately, the edited version is always blander, vaguer, and gives less of an idea what the article is about. There's another example on the front page even now ("esoteric programming paradigms").
Whoever edits titles seems to value brevity and neutrality more highly than saying what's in the article, lately.
Indeed, concreteness & specificity > generalness & neutrality in almost all cases of writing and communication. It even makes for more catchy titles, without being clickbaity.
