skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So nice to hear it:

- We are completely open source under Apache License 2.0

- We are working on the federation. Unfortunately there are no production ready federation protocols at all. XMPP is dead.

- We are work on multiple devices

- We have Android, iOS, Win/Lin/Mac. Anything else? Windows Phone is dead too, other html5-based phones are not popular yet.

- We have two layer TLS with russian and us encryption together. We are in progress in porting Signal's end-to-end protocol.

- You can use email or phone based auth. Our Email-based auth is named "enterprise", but it is same as personal.
> Maybe this guy is the next Elon Musk?

More likely, this guy read the same quote by Elon Musk.
Is telegram truly secure?
Why not just help fix Signal?
I grew up in North Wales and have been working in London in the tech sector for the last 10 years. Considering a move back to the mountains, genuinely interested in what the tech scene is like there now? Can you name some companies?
Remix OS might just make you want to put Android on your laptop
The liveness metric in tech world is simple: is the number of users / new projects currently increasing (then it's alive) or decreasing (then it's dead)?
Good luck. A Ph.D. student of my dad's developed some great tech Google was interested in, and was in buyer's talks to purchase. After a bunch of negotiation, they agreed to a price in the low 7 figures. Awaiting notarization. In a festive mood, he disclosed, apparently, quite a bit about the algorithm.

Google walked. Cancelled everything. The notary, the deal. They didn't need the IP. Just needed to know how it worked, and they got what they needed.

Be careful out there. I didn't know this kind of stuff happened outside of tense procedural court dramas. I guess it happens.
Swift and Kitura on DigitalOcean
So I'm a little confused by this. Is he running Fedora as the main boot operating system or something on top of/beside Android (which he can switch to like an app within Android)?
I like Telegram because there's a native app for Ubuntu Phone.
CustomData in Stormpath is so damn useful.

Looks like you have a typo in your email. Guessing should be:

> randall@stormpath.com
For Apple, a Search for a Moral High Ground in a Heated Debate
I think the precedent that emerges could be that law enforcement can force companies to sign specific functionality. This access-to-data power would be in line with their access to telephone and telegraph copper in centuries past.
Killing civilians is wrong in any case. In fact, wars are also wrong — so if any state starts warmongering, it's necessary to take measures to stop the escalation.

And who killed those 400,000 Syrians? Americans?
Great post.

The government doesn't have our trust because the government does not deserve our trust.
Yes, I think so. I'm being unfair really, it's just that 'first principles' always makes it sound like somebody thinks of themselves as Euclid or Elon Musk.

It's nice to hear somebody else's perspectives otherwise.
I would add to that that, if you are the sole owner of a business, once that business generates enough cash to live on, the excess earnings gives you much more financial flexibility and options than a venture backed startup would. Typically, the founders have to wait 3-5 years before getting any money out of the business in a venture backed startup, but if you are the sole owner, you can choose to keep 100% of your earnings for your own personal pleasure, reinvest 100% of your earnings at your current rate of return (generally 1.5-2x for young companies), or choose somewhere in between. I think a lot of young entrepreneurs don't realize how valuable that flexibility really is, especially once you get married and have kids.
There were far fewer people willing to pay to see Einstein do what he did than to see Babe Ruth did what he did. Millions of people got regular satisfaction from watching Babe Ruth, which suggests more people valued what he did than they valued what Einstein did. Economically speaking the value an average person places on something is no less valid than the value an intellectual places on something, and there are a lot more average people than intellectuals.
How Enterprises Benefit from Microservices Architectures
I have one of the Flir dongles (bought for work: I work with high-power LEDs) and I've gotten quite obsessive about looking for draughts and insulation gaps. It gives you spot temperatures on the screen too, which is really useful. Seeing the icy-blue draught pouring through the broken cat flap seal and pooling on the floor was a wake-up call.
I hope Google encourages spin-offs to be launched from these closing services. Haven't used Google Compare as it's not available in my region, but it seems like a solid concept.
XMPP have a lot of problems:

- Every server support different extensions. Extreemly fragmented.

- No reliable file transfer

- No reliable cross device sync

- Almost all clients are junky

- OTR and GPG are not the best crypto, but more trusted one as it is old and simple. Axolotl Ratchet beat them in every part.

This problems lead us to make messaging (actor.im) from scratch.
Once humanity drives itself extinct, nature will fix everything, sure. That won't help humanity though.
People who start pyramid schemes create huge "compensation" for themselves, ergo they are doing something valuable for society?

This argument doesn't work.
[1] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-rent-seeking-is-too-...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11054527 or possibly https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11041340 (two days earlier, way fewer comments)
It's unsurprising that they succeed some of the time. The extent, on the other hand, is another matter.
So we are no longer waiting for Godot. Don't you think this puts them in a bit of an existential crisis?
Yeah, this.

My feeling is that most people would be against mass surevillance and anti-encryption posturing if they truly understood what was happening and what the imnplications were.

Unfortunately most people do not have a reason to learn about basic infosec during their daily lives and remain blissfully ignorant about it.
Find Your Next Career Path
I was running a prosody instance for a while. I have a 'Programming Jabber' book from O'Reilly sitting in the shelf next to me. I am (was?) a xmpp fan.

The big problem with that one was that

- clients are wildly varying in quality. Mobile clients are quite good by now, desktop clients are rather meh, ugly, all over the place

- multi-device support sucks. You need message carbons (extension, 'solved'), but you also need MAM for history, which was a moving target and unsupported in most clients/servers last time I checked.

That ignores that you need a good number of other extensions to make XMPP mobile friendly (stream management being the minimum, as far as I can tell. Otherwise you WILL just lose messages). XMPP isn't exactly mobile friendly (chattiness, bandwidth) either, as far as I am aware.

In short: Yeah, I would love to agree that XMPP is the solution. Right now I'd say it would be at best ~similar~ to Telegram: A solution with some (different) trade-offs.
We are much more powerful team for UX/performance. We build entire platform from scratch. Signal uses simplest existing technologies on top of only pubsub. We are just working very differently. Making correct multidevice/federation/apps/etc are larger part of the work then crypto (specs are ready).
It is much easier for us to integrate signal protocol to Actor instead of doing opposite.
IoT server boilerplate
I expect that new spinoffs would probably be branded under its own name.
This guy makes most of his money from a dot-com nest egg and the community of people he's built around him that subscribe to his brand of asceticism.

If it brings a person a person emotional comfort to live as the willful anti-consumer, then that's the value in it. But I think it's unkind or deceptive to suggest most people can ride a bike instead of drive a car and suddenly save most of a semi-retirement nest egg in 6-7 years.
Reminds me of this post on Language Log (they actually have a bunch) on why sentence diagramming is obsolete http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4568
I suspect Haskell's syntax isn't as much of an issue as the typical style that Haskell code tends to be written in; really short, abbreviated variable names, and very high code density.
"From scratch" isn't the right metric, you'd compare it to unity or unreal. The key difference is this is actually open source so you have 100% control over your own distribution and licensing.

I haven't looked at it in 6mo but back then on the 1.x branch there were many, many thoroughly polished example games ranging from 2D (platform / isometric / tile) to 3D (third person, others i forget).

Normally you get 1 incomplete mechanic as an example, not an actually playable "game" with more polish than most app store stuff.

I was pleasantly surprised with these polished examples, but at that time the docs were not that thorough (cursory look tells me they've improved), but the examples pretty much made up for it. Almost any game you'd want to make you could start with their example and build out.

I'm excited it's growing. I'll probably play with it for 7DRL.org in a couple weeks.
Introducing the Infinit p2p file system
If you use a desktop client with a physical keyboard, sending tons of messages within a short span of time is very easy to do compared to doing the same with a touchscreen (unless you're quick there too). :)
I always enjoy reading what Bill Gates has to say these days. For obvious reasons at this point.

He's completely right of course on climate change. And yet, the US is about to elect likely one of two exceedingly wealthy individuals who don't remotely care about these issues right now.

It'll be interesting to see in 40 years whether or not humans take this seriously enough / avoid disaster. Let's not forget this very modern internet was created in the last like 15-20 years, huge advances can happen and Gates' optimism isn't a pipe dream that's never happened.
The landlord (or whomever he inherited the property from) created enough value to buy the house. This individual would have refrained from consuming some of the value they produced in order to save money for the house, meaning this produced-yet-not-consumed value could be invested, increasing the overall productive capacity of society. The landlord could even have been a low-wage worker themselves, who saved money for years so that they could buy a house and have a more comfortable life, with the rent they're able to charge being an economic reward for the consumption they forwent.
Vile is a more common word. Some adults probably don't know the word vial at all.
A gaping "backdoor" already exists in the form of the software update mechanism. By the same logic you're using, Apple can't keep their source code and signing key secure forever, which would be a much worse leak than them losing control of a modified iOS that would let someone brute force a PIN for a phone in their physical possession without the phone being wiped.
I have to disagree. Announcing a major new release by version number is enough to be most people to click on the link.

Now a lack of release notes and a major features/what's new document - that's a release promotion fail.
Thanks for link. It would be nice to know the methodology used. Surprised to see bananas higher than mushrooms and cauliflower considering their protective outer skin.
I registered just to say thank you for WordGrinder! I used it for a long time when I was in a sysadmin non-job where there was very little work to do.

I used to write blog posts in WordGrinder in a terminal over SSH (so it looked like work) then post them when I got home. It kept me sane until I'd saved up enough money to quit and find something a bit more rewarding.
I think the same thing when I meet coders who spend their time on ways to get consumers to click on more ads. Or ways to track consumers. Or ways to trick consumers into providing their personal information.
on top, since it's using a chroot.
To be explicit (you implied being involved ofc): You're the CEO of actor, right? :) Thank you for the replies.

Questions:

1) My first "Why Actor" question still stands. How do you position yourself against Telegram (according to the first Actor post that's where you're coming from) or other solutions? The web page didn't help me.

2) How are you planning to make money/to stay in business?

Regarding the bullet points:

- How easy is it to build/run a server?

- Everytime federated messages come up, someone will mention matrix [1][2]. Did you look into that?

- Can you explain 'two layer TLS with russian and us encryption'? Or point me to a resource about that?

1: http://matrix.org
2: http://vector.im
This has been going on for a while, with several HN submissions over the years, but this time the article ("Received 17 May 2014, Accepted 19 November 2014, Published 20 January 2015") has pictures of the letters that can be seen, still quite fuzzy:

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150120/ncomms6895/images/n...

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150120/ncomms6895/images/n...
They can't monetize it enough, which seems like a perfect situation to sell it to someone who will be happy with a lower cash flow point, or spin it off.

It's actually surprising to me that big companies are so ready to kill products instead of selling them to someone who cares.
What is the switch on the front for? 2M/5M?
> If you sell the generator and don't make an explicit claim over produced works, they are the copyright of the person who clicked the button.

I'm not sure this would meet the "threshold of originality" standard [1]. The simple act of pushing a button can meet the requirement for "at least some minimal degree of creativity" (as in your example of taking a photo), but I don't think it would do so when there is no relationship between the manner or timing of the button push and the output of the tool.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality
Of all the things holding Scala back, frozen syntax is the least of its worries.

My two biggest day-to-day peeves are:

1) The poor quality of the entire tool chain
2) Immature libraries and ecosystem

Tool chain: from the slow-as-molasses compiler, to the fact that every so often IDEA gives up and refuses to parse parts of our project, to the horror that is SBT, working with Scala just feels* painful. Heck! - my Macbook Pro sounds like it's taking off whenever I start a Scala compile, and if I'm building from scratch? https://xkcd.com/303/

Libraries and ecosystem: many opensource Scala libraries feel more like experiments in language wrangling or narrow (exposing only a tiny subset of the underlying features) wrappers for existing Java libraries than well-tested code. Documentation? Almost always spotty. Library community? Spotty. Source? Good luck reading it. Depending on the author's bent it can range from vaguely understandable to downright inscrutable. (On this last point: I've often poked around various Java/Python/Go/C libraries and been able to figure out fairly quickly what's going on. Much less so with Scala.)

Besides those two points - Scala is complex. To a newcomer the language is unfriendly and has a lot of rough edges. You have to build a lot of context to interpret existing Scala code - and much of this context is incidental to the problem at hand. This makes it very tough to incrementally learn about Scala features/syntax and slowly explore an existing Scala code base (especially an opensource one, where authors are more likely flexing their advanced Scala knowledge). And all that syntactic sugar? Terse. Elegant. Unintelligible to a newcomer.

Sorry. /rant over.
Visual Capitalist
> Question for HN in general: Is it possible in principle (for Apple or someone else) to construct a smartphone that can accept software/firmware updates, but that Apple cannot push malware to at some later time?

I've been thinking about a related question: how to construct an update system so the updater cannot push malware to a specific phone, without making it visible and available to everyone else?

My answer would be something like Certificate Transparency (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency). The update system would only accept an update if it's signed by several independent entities, spread all over the world (in many independent jurisdictions), and the signing system in these entities would be designed in such a way that every signature is written to an append-only log which is published to everyone to see, and these entities would also publish a copy of every update they signed.

That way, Apple could still push malware to a phone, but they couldn't push malware to a phone without making that fact public, at least to security researchers who can reverse-engineer firmware updates.
I guess what I'm asking is if the syscall wrappers are in rust or if rust just calls glibc wrappers.
I'm not sure I understand this. Apple seems to be limiting all discussion to in-situ mechanisms of cracking, but no one is talking about external means. For example ICE-level debuggers require sophisticated hardware that is not easily available to everyone. Likewise, the XBOX encryption was very difficult to crack without Ghz hardware.

Just put the critical path in the prom and then bypass the prom with your own hardware-level circuit. The device itself can be keyed so that only Apple hardware bypass is allowed to connect in this way. Now you have a physical bypass that is difficult if not impossible to get around, but enables warranted access by agencies that own the limited hardware. This also has the advantage of human cost. You can't easily apply this method to millions of phones without a huge cost in time and effort. Even if the device is stolen, it limits exposure to phones in the physical possession of the hardware bypass which is surely better than compromising millions of phones. And so what that the critical path patch exists out in the open? Knock yourself out and make an emulator that will unlock hw emulated phones (which is a difficult task, not even the IOS emulator is a true hw emulator), but it won't work on the actual hardware unless the prom is swapped which is hardly trivial.

The key signing argument has little weight by the way. DVD manufacturers had the same stance and the root key was leaked to the public. How can Apple guarantee the same won't happen with their keys?

It seems both Apple and the FBI are withholding something, but on face value the technical requirements should allow warranted access. The fact that they don't is a flaw in the technology design.

Case law surely has precedents in this area? Can safe manufacturers be required to make bypass mechanisms for bank vaults? What about non-criminal property law? Say a family member dies and the legal estate needs access?
I only just got my first proper HD monitor at home, and we have exactly one 4K monitor at work for compatibility testing.

Versions of Windows earlier than 10 do display scaling badly, so having a very high resolution monitor can be unusable.
Ask HN: Best practices to store notifications in Node.js + MongoDB application?
This is somewhat of a complicated subject. Each application has it's own needs but I'm curious to know what best practices and architecture you all recommend when storing a user's notifications in a Node.js + MongoDB application.

Essentially, we have a notifications icon in our web application (similar to Facebook etc.) that shows notifications based on certain events triggered by other users in the application. Some notifications can also have actions when clicked on them.

The plan I had:

1. Store all notifications in a 'notifications' collection

2. Each document in the collection has the notification text, unread status and action (if applicable)

3. When the user clicks the notification icon in the interface, they see a list of unread notifications and upon closing the drawer, an XHR gets called to mark all notifications as read

Is this a good way to do it?
The docs discuss lists and reference Facebook Notes which uses Draft. The demo doesn't support the nested lists but Notes does. I've tried it out and it supports tab and shift-tab. The only limitation seems to be that you can't select multiple items and indent them together - it has to be one at a time. I'm unsure if that's a limitation of Draft though.
I think you have misunderstood; what s/he said was "the evidence" that they produce something of value is their compensation". In other words: if what they were doing were useless, no one would pay them all that money to do it.

I think this is wrong, though, at least when the question is value to society. Their compensation is very good evidence that they are doing something of value to someone, but that may be counterbalanced by negative consequences for other people.

For instance, suppose I happen to be a very skilled thief, and some acquisitive billionaire pays me to steal great artworks from museums so that he can hang them in his living room. This is a very valuable service for the billionaire, because the museums probably wouldn't sell them to him at all, and if they did they'd be incredibly expensive; so paying me $1M for each theft is a big win for him. And he really, really loves art, and loves knowing that he owns precious things* even more, and he has money to burn, so getting those artworks is easily worth the $1M/item to him.

In this scenario, I am providing plenty of value (as measured in dollars) to my employer, and my compensation reflects that. But am I doing something of value to society? Hell, no. Perhaps our hypothetical billionaire gets more satisfaction from looking at the Mona Lisa than most of those schlubs at the Louvre, but surely nowhere near enough more to make it better for it to hang in his house than in the museum.
Christoph Hellwig vs. VMware
Funny that Sweden ain't mentioned there with atleast bands like At the Gates, In Flames and Dark Tranquillity (I saw some mention of Opeth)...
and a linux/Ubuntu desktop app
Even if he put that $150 million left in a bank and only earned 1% interest it would still be $1.5 million a year, so I doubt it's much of a problem.
Call Logger – Manage Your Call Log and Makes Your Life Easy
I believe for many of the same reasons that Lisp was used with great success in the past. OCaml is descended from the ML family of languages and grounded in solid mathematics, like Haskell. In the hands of the right person it's a formidable tool and arguably provides barriers to entry for competitors.
Humanity won't drive itself extinct, the brunt of the effects will hit the weakest hardest. The west can probably afford climate change(in the purely economical sense), as most of the west is currently located in the north temperate zone.
what are you advocating?
Which is "for widespread libraries, the choices are basically C, C++, and now (hopefully) rust.": as in C++ you can use high-level constructs internally without relying on an extensive runtime, and expose and easy-to-FFI C interface.

Rust still has insufficiencies though, the inability to customise the (library's) allocator is one I think.
Would love to hear what features in your opinion but Gitlab miles ahead of Bitbucket Server.
Well that would certainly coincide with a good reason why the NSA/GCHQ where spying on Amnesty International.
Safe Box – Easiest Way to Hide Your Secrets Pics, Videos, Documents, Apps