skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> EDIT: They use i5 and i7 processors, which IIRC use black-box Intel microcode... Also, i wonder if they support Libreboot? My apologies if it turns out i cannot read. Otherwise they look quite nice. I'm excited to see more "alternatives" in the "free as in liberty" laptop space.

They are going to use coreboot, which is free but includes some binary blobs from Intel. I don't think you can boot any modern x86 without a binary blob from the CPU manufacturer, unfortunately.

I also don't think it's possible to get any modern machine up without some device firmware blobs. The best-case is that all the blobs are provided onboard so the OS doesn't need to provide them, but they're still there and we have to trust them.

Purism seems to me an incremental improvement and I might buy one, but I really hope for a truly free machine someday.
One of the reasons technical people use ad-blockers is because they don't want to download 10 MB of crap for a 300-word page. "The customer hasn't downloaded our crap" should be trivially detectable.
Well, fwiw my local Debian Jessie claimed terminology along with dependencies (that weren't already installed) would claim 24MB. Pretty steep for a terminal. I tried opening one each of Terminology and Sakura[s] -- and as far as I can tell, running:

i=0;while true; do echo $i;i=$((i+1));done

is, if anything, slower in Terminology. Big caveat: I've just installed kernel 4.1.6 and while I've recompiled/installed the proprietary fglrx AMD driver, I'm not entirely convinced most OpenGL apps work as they should.

[s] http://www.pleyades.net/david/projects/sakura
What about Facebook, which not only has 1 billion users, but owns WhatsApp and Instagram, 2 of their largest competitors. In terms of dollars, given most other social networks aren't really monetizing yet, I'm guessing Facebook's market share would be >90%.
Let's add in

3. It should working without a network connection, unless there's an over-riding need
Background: I needed to sync the contacts with Google. Meanwhile, Google disabled the ActiveSync support, the phone was reset, and I was looking for some app to do that. In the past, there were apps capable of doing so, but now, they were unavailable. Add to that inability to side-load the apps..

Regarding the retro-compatibility:

Nobody supports Android 1.x either. However, in the past, developers did upload their apps that did work on these devices. So why the users shouldn't be able to download these old versions?

And that's the difference. Apple actively removed old packages from the store, while Google just left them there. Just this alone makes the old android devices more useful.
My wife and I are the same way.

Giving up privacy and personal space in a relationship IS unhealthy.

To feel that one has a right to search through one's spouses belongings is a sign of immaturity and insecurity. There's no way to have a healthy meaningful relationship with someone when one feels that way.
Good news is social skills is something you can learn.
s/terminology/terminator/ then ..
One important distinction to make is that this very much depends on what package manager you're talking about.

Linux package managers tend to use signing and other mechanisms to check content.

Software library package managers (e.g. npm, rubygems, etc) generally don't. Some of them offer signing but almost no packages are actually signed, and they don't do any curation of content.
PayPal Inks Key Payments Deal with Macy’s, and Other Payments News
Come guys, just use clang!

It's state of the art, all the tooling already exists, and its under a very permission license (http://clang.llvm.org/features.html#license).

You don't need to rewrite all of these tools.

/me shakes head.
I've often wondered how many lives would be saved if people wore helmets during daily driving. I'd bet a lot. Of course, good luck getting people to do it.
It may be much simpler than that.
It may be that e-book adoption, like almost all emerging technologies, follows the classic Hype Cycle - we're just past the peak.
Yes, it's insecure and is based on complete trust of the author of the script and the hosting provider, but there's an easy workaround: Don't pipe to bash immediately.

Download the file, inspect the contents and then if you're satisfied with what the script will perform, then run it through bash.
You may need a smartphone, though that's debatable, but you don't need a high-end expensive one. And those wont't have paper specs anywhere near PS4-level anytime soon.
So what? Is it ok to just trow them into garbage then?

You can still use them for calls and messages. You can still use one of them for apps, that were developed for this device.
Rails API and react-rails gem should be good combination.
AU gov anti-radicalisation kit links activism, “alternative music” to terrorism
I suspect that you can also add a thin layer of solar panels with wiring stretched between wings and tail, increasing usable surface significantly, without big changes in volume, mass, or drag.
That's far from enough.
I can't say, but I love what Perl 6 has done. For example, here's a Point class, with read/write, mandatory attributes:

class Point {
has $.x is rw is required;
has $.y is rw is required;
}

Like many dynamic languages, there's nothing to stop you from assigning the string "foo" to one of those attributes, so let's fix that, but go even further and constrain the X and Y coordinates from -10.0 to 10.0. (Note that a "Rat" is a rational number, so it's perfectly precise and doesn't suffer from floating points imprecision):

class Point {
subset PointLimit of Rat where -10.0 .. 10.0;
has PointLimit $.x is rw is required;
has PointLimit $.y is rw is required;
}

So what that's done is allowed the dev to declare a new type, PointLimit, on the fly. It must be a number from -10 to 10. And then we have our X and Y attributes:

my $point = Point.new( x => -1.2, y => 7.3 );
$point.x = 3.14;
$point.y = -22.0; # Boom! Constraint violation
How is that an argument against curl|bash? If you download a source tarball from the developer's website, then you are also trusting their hosting provider. curl|bash changes nothing.
Is it more security vulnerabilities ?
Very well done. The sidebar is a nice addition.
You may have the most awesome setup in the world, with certificate stapling and keysigning and best-practice scripting and whatever. But curl|bash is simply a bad habit to reinforce. It's a bit like saying that we don't need laws against burglary, because I would never burgle anyone, and I have a 24/7 camera on me to prove where I am at any given time.

That bad habit isn't the worst thing in the world, but it's low-hanging fruit in terms of problematic things to reduce.
The thing is, unit tests that are affordable to implement, are not wort it. Their objectives should rather be verified with language choice, programming techniques, and assertions. Tests that are worthwhile to write are those that test interactions of multiple subsystems. But those are not unit tests any more. If you end up _actually needing_ TDD, then that proves you are using the wrong language and/or the wrong technique.
I used to do that but found it ultimately too fiddly - like if you need to unblock a site manually editing your etc/hosts, then you have to get your browser to refresh it's DNS cache.

Do you use an app to manage your hosts file?
Got a reply from Christopher-

Nikon D80, Nikon D810 and Leica M
I've had the same email account since the Gmail invite-only days, been on Facebook since 2007. If my GF wanted to look through it all with a fine tooth comb, she could, and there's nothing in there that I wouldn't want her to see. But the very fact that she felt like she had the need to look would suggest a huge failing in our relationship.
A source tarball can (and should!) be checked against GPG signatures et. al.

With curl|bash you have nothing.
Kill switch to me implies an emergency power-off, like the "emergency" button on an escalator.

To me these are better called "hard power switches".
It's going to make it in some form, possibly even it's current form, but it isn't formally part of the spec yet.
Data Science Weekly Newsletter – Issue #96
The issue is the same for installing anything from source not because you sued Bash/Curl same can be said for the Arch community made package managements for the AUR packages.
I was referring to cryptographic package signing (e.g. with PGP) so you validate the signature of the package before installing, this lets you validate that the package hasn't been modified since it was signed.

curl|bash ing a script does not provide this protection.
AFAIK the microcode updates aren't mandatory, you can use your computer without them and use the stock microcode (though that's also proprietary).
Europe Again Fails to Solve Its Refugee Crisis
You mean like how Google is a big time donor to quite a few Congresspeople, who write letters and vote on behalf of Google in our Congress?

See Anna Eshoo: Her biggest donor is a Google employee, and she's literally written a letter defending Google to the EU Parliament on Congressional letterhead, signed by a bunch of other Congresspeople, many of whom also had their campaigns at least partially supported by Googlers.
It's using Y position of the mouse to determine the size of the tiles.

http://etisab.github.io/penrose.js - see the processing.draw call.
To support a "secure" curlbash for https://github.com/tillberg/gut, I used shasum to verify the sha256 hash for the script that is downloaded (before it is executed), and then the script in turn verifies the sha256 hash for the tarballs it downloads.

For example:

$ bash -c 'S="3bceab0bdc63b2dd7980161ae7d952ea821a23e693cb74961b0d41f61f557489";T="/tmp/gut.sh";set -e;wget -qO- "https://www.tillberg.us/c/$S/gut-1.0.3.sh">$T; echo "$S $T"|shasum -a256 -c-;bash $T;rm $T'

It makes for an uglier command, but it (theoretically) does a pretty good job of verifying that the thing that you download is the thing that you expect to download. It both prevents MITM attacks, TLS verification issues, as well as prevents me from putting some other code there for you to download in the future instead. It either downloads the code you saw the first time it downloaded, or it fails, nothing in-between.
Belgian court gives Uber 21 days to end UberPop service
New Horizons: Pluto displays rippling terrain
5 reasons why you should fire workaholic programmers
Exactly the same here. I feel (and hope) that this is how most of couples work, but we only hear about the loud and paranoid ones.
Google’s Focus Problem
Nice blog! Yes I am interested in Deep learning, although am just a newbie. Right now I just read around in several blogs to get the idea.
As for JS visualizations, TonicDev[1] is a nice option if someone wants a IPython style notebook in JS

[1] https://tonicdev.com
It's not about market share or dominance or even monopoly.

It's about the question of engaging in anti-competitive practices and Apple is guilty of those despicable practices.

However, I must say that I am not totally sold on all the examples cited in the ancestor comment esp. that developers having to work exclusively on Mac machines to build for iOS devices because that's on the business side of the equation and mostly motivated by financial gains.

On the other hand, as a consumer I'm severely affected negatively by the restrictions Apple imposing on the browser engines available on their mobile devices and the monopoly Safari WebKit enjoys there and I'm really frustrated by that and by the fact that no one yet went after them for this but when you take into consideration that a lot of the big guns in the system are investing in this evil corporation, things become very obvious to you.
Like what?

When considered as a whole of the combination of what is possible with the stdlib and all of the best gems available, Ruby can be written clearly and tersely. Those are the two first and most important things that I look for to do general web application development. From that perspective it beats Javascript, Python, Php, Java, C#, Go, Scala, Erlang, Haskell, OCaml, and every other language I've used.

I'm not saying Ruby is the best language ever. It has its flaws. In a few places in the stdlib, it doesn't make sense. There are languages, with maybe Smalltalk and Lisp at the top of the list, that beat Ruby from a simplicity and purity standpoint. But, Ruby is just great to use. I love reading it and love using it. It took a few years in the beginning of love and hate, but if I was stuck on a deserted island and had one programming language, Ruby would be it for me.

If it weren't for the Ruby core group being so exclusive and bitter towards others getting involved to make it even better, and if it weren't for the Rails core team just having too much to do and being unable to execute on support, documentation, performance, clarity, simplicity, and important features all at the same time, then maybe it would be the world's number one language and Rails would be the number one web framework.

Instead Javascript had emerged years ago as the language of choice in the browser, had plenty of attention spent on making it execute quickly, etc. though it was an uglier language than Ruby, and because of that attention, it is today's number one language for the web. But, I still like Ruby.
Sorry, but NONE of this anti-trust territory.

iPhones not running Android apps is not harm to consumers (leaving aside the technical hurdles of a few GB of libraries an OS wrappers). Apps not being allowed might be anti-trust, but the app policy is pretty fairly applied and is not necessarily anti-competitive so that would be a hard one to prove.

Impact on software developers is NOT harm to consumers, it's just not.

Competitive differentiation is NOT anti-trust.

Finally, according to IDC, Google has 82% of the world market in units shipped. You are seriously losing the plot when you say Apple's actions are harming consumers by reducing market for non-iOS devices when Apple only has 13% world market share.
4 ways to tighten your designer–developer collaboration
Forensic Imager Tools: You Don't Have the Evidence (2014)
> Yes, but these usually also come with checksums

Checksums provide zero security benefit. You'd need signatures (like sandstorm.io provides) to actually protect against adversary modifying the installation media.
Sean Grove: #ReactJS Stopped Me from Quitting Programming
What's their rationale for saying That Node is not ready? I've found it to be stable and performant, and if it doesn't have quite the volume of useful libraries Ruby/Rails does, it's certainly fast approaching.
So is Stingray and what the TSA does to you at the airport but I guess we are never going to address that.
I have looked at the price lately. In fact using the Coindesk chart[0], over the last 3 months it has swung between 200 and 300 USD you are correct. But a drop from 300 to 200 USD is still volatile as hell. It means that my Salary could lose one third of it's value in the space of a month. The one year chart is worse. Of course it could swing the other way too, but I like a little more safety in my income.

As for it not being a toy, that's a matter of how we each use it. You use it as a more serious financial instrument evidently. Personally I prefer services such as TransferWise, for reducing those bank fees, but if that's how you use Bitcoin then good for you!

[0] http://www.coindesk.com/price/
By my calculations, you could assign 1000 /48 subnets per second for 4.8 trillion years before exhausting that space.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%282%5E125%29%2F%282%5E...
Content Curation Primer
Yes, but being a monopoly isn't, by itself, bad. You have to be abusing that monopoly to harm consumers.

Not saying that Facebook isn't harming consumers, just that that harm isn't necessarily related to their monopoly position.
3D movies?
Kafka in a Nutshell
Rails has always given me conventions to follow when creating/writing apps - except for javascript. Rails never really had any conventions for writing javascript. Hopefully, you and your coworkers had good habits when writing/organizing your js, but rails never really gave you any guidance except to throw it in your apps/assets/js folder.

> There is ES6/Typescript- that is the future.

According to the sprockets-es6 github page, its goal is to have es6 functionality in sprockets 4 by default.

> Node is still not ready.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by this statement. It's very ambiguous.

Anyways, you might want to look at MeteorJS. It's a rails-like framework in javascript. It's not ready yet if you want to use a database other than mongo.

> I just feel let down. I want to get excited about Rails again, but give me a path.

One of the lessons that I've learned working with OSS is that we as individuals & developers are responsible to create these paths. The people who develop Rails & other awesome oss are just regular janes/joes like you and me.

> I don't really like Ember a whole lot, because the community is just not where it is with Angular and React

The ember community is not as big as Angular's or React, but it definitely does exist & is very friendly helpful.

IMO, Ember (along with Ember-Data & Ember-CLI) is the Rails of the js frameworks, it follows strong conventions and comes with a lot of magic right out of the box. You should check out their guide - perhaps they could have an overview that actually states the features that come out of the box.
Did they really try to hide it though? They didn't attempt to stop the report from being published.

All they did was not promote it themselves. Is that a bit unethical? Perhaps, but saying they actively tried to hide or bury it makes it seem like they tried to stop the researchers from publishing their results or otherwise put pressure on them to fudge their results. Neither of those things happened.

Honestly, I think the Independent is making a big deal out of it because of the current perception around the VW scandal. And everyone in this thread is eating it up. If this same thing happened without the VW scandal, I doubt anyone cares half as much.
A bash script can be signed too. See article.

How many projects provide GPG signatures for their tarballs?

How often do you check signatures on tarballs?
Yes, but these usually also come with checksums.

Checksums on the same site as the downloadable file are not that useful. If an attacker can replace the binary, they can also replace the checksum.

If the checksum is on another site, it makes it more difficult as an attacker would have to break in to both sites.
Before realizing this was on a site for the RTL-SDR software, I found it very odd that the author felt the need to define "Pulsar" but not "RTL-SDR".

For those punching through without investigating, "RTL-SDR is a very cheap software defined radio that uses a DVB-T TV tuner dongle based on the RTL2832U chipset." So yea... this is pretty cool.
What about other professional fields - life guards, coast guard, forrest patrol? Any adoption in these areas? Would think implementation costs would be initial barrier to entry, but Moore's Law would indicate over the few years that costs wouldn't be as prohibitive...
Why do you trust that the signing key actually belongs to the developer? If I were an evil hosting provider I would simply change the key fingerprint displayed on the download page.
Light Rail: Tracking the MBTA in real time, on my wall
Of course you can still check signatures if you wish. Heck, sandstorm even provides instructions on how to do it on their installation manual: https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/install/#option-3-pgp-ve...
I think they're referring to the scalability problem where the number of transactions and size of the blockchain grow to a point where running a full node is prohibitively expensive and leads to a smaller number of miners verifying transactions.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2015/01/blockchain-scalability.html
You could use Clojurescript (another functional language). I've enjoyed my experience with it thus far.
PreCrime
So when will they support C99 (I'm not even asking about C11)?
Isn't this the sort of thing humans are supposed to be bad at but AI should be good at?

An automated justice system wouldn't be biased by human prejudice, ignorance or fear. It doesn't get tired, doesn't feel pain or pity or remorse. It would be able to impartially and accurately process vast amounts of data - far more than a human, and the actions of the drones could be completely auditable. Drones won't lie on the stand to protect their fellow drones, or tamper with evidence.

You could walk down the street surrounded by police drones and be confident that you're not being profiled based on racist or religious bigotry, but pure mathematics and statistics. In every conceivable way, an armed drone with a license to kill is safer, faster, more reliable than a human. One only has to look at the current justice system in any country to see that humans are simply not capable of properly judging the motives of, or punishing, other humans in any reasonable way.

People will simply have to accept that the day will come when human-applied justice is viewed with the same ridicule and scorn that witch-burning is today... as the vicious, superstitious barbarism of an ignorant past.
Hey Rayalez,

Some friends and I run a project which could be relevant. It is called Taaalk (http://taaalk.co) and is an online platform for conversations. So if you don't know what to write but have a friend that would happily discuss a subject with you, or know someone you'd like to learn something from by asking them questions then it works well.

We've found that people discover they know a lot of valuable information which they didn't consider valuable until someone started asking them about it. Sounds like this could apply to you. Drop me a line at josh[at]taaalk.co if you want to get involved.
Life Inside a Consumer Capitalist Hell
Yes. But it's not harming consumers in the US (anymore) as less than 40% of people are using IE on the desktop, chrome is the dominate browser. In the EU, MS has to give people the choice of browser on install for this reason.
Instead of protecting and helping victims, expect them to retaliate and be waiting when they do... Awesome.
What I got from this article: "`curl|bash` can be secure if you add signing, file integrity checking, and trust the source."
The whole time I kept thinking, these are assurances you can get from traditional mature package management.
> Move to a community that encourages clean code, "craftmanship", designs, patterns and so on, you will become a better programmer. If that is what you want.

Hopefully, Drupal 8 is going to bring all those fun parts again.
Tech overkill destroyed the loveliest, liveliest city on the West Coast
>>sell a product that delights your customers.

I think, for Quirky, the key question was who are your customers? Was it the inventors, or the consumers whose problems the inventors were trying to solve?
This nifty web app is a good starting point: http://js2.coffee/

It's not perfect but it's how I learned coffeescript.

Other than that, I don't think Rails necessarily pushes either for/against coffeescript. You can either use it or not. Plenty of rails apps have been written in plain 'ol js.
VLAs do not absolve you of the need to ensure the buffer is the right size. In fact, they can be worse since at least malloc()'s failure can be determined from its return value. A VLA will just overflow the stack silently:

https://www.clarkcox.com/blog/2009/04/07/c99s-vlas-are-evil/

Edit: to expand on this point, if you really need to keep all that data in memory at once, it's often better to just malloc() a buffer of the appropriate size and reuse it, reallocating if it should be bigger. (Obviously, do not forget to free() it eventually.)
Stinky Cheese Is a Result of Evolutionary Overdrive
ES6 Modules in Depth