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> On every distro uninstalling packages never really reverts the system to its previous state, always leaves some junk behind.

Not at all. Apt has been able to remove everything for the last 20 years.


> Not at all. Apt has been able to remove everything for the last 20 years.

Not really. It can remove configuration files etc. it knows about, but it can't know about files later created by the application itself.


I'd say that's either 1) outside the scope of the package manager, or 2) mostly-solvable as long as your package manager allows you to specify "extra files created by the application that I do not install but I will want to uninstall."

That's also not what's being asked for here. The basic request is this: track which packages were manually vs automatically installed, and give the user the ability to remove automatically-installed orphans whose manually-installed reverse-dependencies are no longer installed. This is what APT does and it works fine 99% of the time.


Isn't that a feature? Should my settings be cleared if I uninstall a program and reinstall it later? Should all my libre office documents disappear when I uninstall libre office?


Over the years I've seen "hacker" news become more of an echo chamber and instantly downvote anything against doctrine...

I'll be downvoted for saying this.


> I'll be downvoted for saying this.

Because it's against the site guidelines.

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


Yep


Not so simple. If the clone gains significant market share it can enforce compatibility.


I.E. basically what happened with IBM Compatibles in the 80's


"some sort of virtue thing" sounds like cynical way to describe ethical values.

Yes, most people I know don't want to waste electricity on driers even when it's cheap.


You are comparing CO2 emission and use of metal and completely ignore the catastrophic systemic risk of nuclear power.

There has been many events where nuclear waste has been dumped in the ocean, misplaced, lost, improperly buried, leaked in rivers, caught fire and even deliberately used in projectiles and dispersed in the environment.

And this is nothing compared to the risk of exposing large amounts of waste during a war or terrorist attack.


fear mongering

please have actual figures about death and cancer, and compare them with car exhaust and air quality

it is illegal to dump nuclear waste


The statistics on the amount of cocaine show an appalling pattern of lying and false evidence from the police.

It's even more appalling that people hardly acknowledge such bias.


Please do not jump to conclusions and read the footnote which addresses that point explicitly: "drug seizure records, amounts seized do not appear to be the cause of this change."


I do not have access to the original paper, but author's assessment that the bunching is due to prosecutorial discretion is a little puzzling to me. If it is true that prosecutors are choosing to prosecute cases that are above the cutoff at a higher rate than those below, I would have expected everything above 280g to increase, rather than a solitary spike at 280g?


From Note 1:

> prosecutors can charge people for amounts that are not the same as the amount seized and then notes

If someone is caught with 500g you can simply charge 280g and make your life easier. If you charge 500g the defendant will argue it was just 450g, which even if irrelevant makes the case seem weaker to the jury--death by a thousand cuts. But if you charge 280g and present evidence of 500g, it makes the case seem more like a slam-dunk to the jury.


Ah interesting/makes sense - thanks for the explanation!


That seems to mean "if you assume that the drug seizure records are not falsified, you can conclude that the police are not lying or producing false evidence".


It means the police are not falsifying records of drug seizures to make them hit any of the statutory thresholds. They may be falsifying them in other ways but this can’t be verified one way or another by this data.


From the quote in the footnotes: "I do find bunching at 280g after 2010 in case management data from the Executive Office of the US Attorney (EOUSA). I also find that approximately 30% of prosecutors are responsible for the rise in cases with 280g after 2010, and that there is variation in prosecutor-level bunching both within and between districts. Prosecutors who bunch cases at 280g also have a high share of cases right above 28g after 2010 (the 5-year threshold post-2010) and a high share of cases above 50g prior to 2010 (the 10-year threshold pre-2010). Also, bunching above a mandatory minimum threshold persists across districts for prosecutors who switch districts. Moreover, when a “bunching” prosecutor switches into a new district, all other attorneys in that district increase their own bunching at mandatory minimums. These results suggest that the observed bunching at sentencing is specifically due to prosecutorial discretion"

If you had to work to parse it like I did, the TL;DR is that a minority (30%) of prosecutors are responsible for the "bunching" and it seems they intentionally are choosing to prosecute more cases at this level.

So, there may be police falsifying evidence, but the paper couldn't detect that and it seems more driven by prosecutors choosing to do "bunching" to get the amount of crack to hit the minimum.

IANAL so not sure what bunching means. Maybe instead of charges from separate arrests, they group them together as one large case?


i mean, it's the cops, what do you expect exactly


Lesson (not?) learnt: choose your audience. Choose what crowd you want to hang out with.


I studied engineering in a country with a non-idiotic university program.

Books (in b/w), pencil and paper. Lessons using a whiteboard or blackboard with chalk. Desks and chairs.

Some of the rooms where exactly the same used a century ago.

You learn theory, not how some "new technology of the year" works.

> I would point out that universal public education is a recent thing.

"recent" as in french revolution.

> Sure, maybe classroom education should focus on "the good, the true, and the beautiful" but then why should we expect everyone to do it?

Yes.


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