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The most popular blog posts about open source on Hacker News. 1,100 posts.

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95

Open Source Tax Software

Filing taxes in America sucks. Your options are to do it by hand, pay someone like Intuit, or if you are below a certain income threshold get some tax software for free. The kicker is that free tax software is from Intuit who will try very hard to make sure that you either don’t find it in the first place, or try to…

101

Open-Source Virtual Background

With many of us around the globe under shelter in place due to COVID-19 video calls have become a lot more common. In particular, ZOOM has controversially become very popular. Arguably Zoom’s most interesting feature is the “ Virtual Background ” support which allows users to replace the background behind them in…

105

I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

Two years ago, Red Hat killed CentOS, a widely-used free version of their Enterprise Linux distribution. The community of CentOS users—myself included—were labeled as 'freeloaders', using the work of the almighty Red Hat corporation, without contributing anything back. Don't mind all the open source developers, Linux…

108

GNU Recutils

Fred and George, Turtles in love There are hundreds of cool command line tools that have been made over the years built on the unix philosophy. Plain text is powerful, ubiquitous, and human-centric. It was also the only option for computing for quite a while. It’s no surprise that some of the most sophisticated tools…

112

Dear Dr. Stallman: An Open Letter

Dear Dr. Stallman, Thank you for coming to Penn and giving a talk on A Free Digital Society; it was an honor meeting you. You mentioned that what you expected of us was to help the Free Software Foundation however we could; I'd like to take you up on that and offer both yourself and the FSF the following advice: Stop…

115

The End of Gmane?

In 2002, I grew annoyed with not finding the obscure technical information I was looking for, so I started Gmane, the mailing list archive. All technical discussion took place on mailing lists thos…

117

Wikileaks To Leak 5000 Open Source Java Projects

Java's not even *fun* enough to laugh at. I expect after your sabbatical you would be trolling at Scala or Haskell or Go ! What's next ? Jokes about making GUIs in VB ? Pshh. Seriously though, I can get the attack on privateness and finality. From someone with a strong dynamic tropism, that makes sense. But that good…

120

Truecrypt report

A few weeks back I wrote an update on the Truecrypt audit promising that we’d have some concrete results to show you soon. Thanks to some hard work by the NCC Crypto Services group, soon is n…