skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
but how do you know if it really is the source code of Signal?

That's a valid question which used to bug me about open source projects. But apparently they finally figured out that the output of the source needs to be deterministic and match the binaries they ship. This property is called "reproducible builds". Signal claims to have them (modulo some third party libraries), though I haven't personally verified it: https://signal.org/blog/reproducible-android/

Honestly though, trust boils down to trusting people. I trust Signal because I trust Moxie, and I trust Moxie because of his reputation among the prominent security experts publicly active on the internet, at least the ones that I find convincing. As a security layman, that's the best I can do.
My group of friends migrated from Messenger to Discord a few days ago, we are very pleased. Here's a list of what I love the most:

* When a friend arrived in the evening and the others had been talking about random things all day long, the friend was often submerged by the amount of fluff to read. Discord solves this in two ways: 1) the different channels allow us to keep discussions tidy, we have a channel for random discussion, one for our evening plans, one for future holidays, one for music... 2) we can pin (not sure of the name in English) important messages, so the friends arriving later only have to read those.

* The desktop application feels light-weight and fast, even on my weak chromebook. Compared to the memory hog that was Messenger in the browser, it's very pleasant.

* Many fun functionalities such as custom emojis. The emoji panel that opens when you type a colon makes it easier to find the reaction you want to send. I'm aware many on HN don't see the point of emojis, but I find them really fun and useful.

* Bots. Good luck having a bot in a Messenger discussion, with Discord it's trivial.

* The audio discussions are very easy to use and efficient. I love the push to talk mode.

* Muting is fine-grained. You can mute one channel, an entire server,...

* The reactions system makes it trivial to very spontaneously start a little poll. "Where do you guys want to eat? [Letter A emoji] restaurant x [Letter B emoji] restaurant y", and then you react to your own message with both emojis. Your friends just have to click one of the reactions to add theirs, so the little numbers next to each reaction act like a poll counter.

* You can edit your own messages, with no time limit AFAIK. Very convenient, especially with the up arrow which automatically edits your last message.

* Roles are precise and easy to use. We have a role for the core group of friends, with our private channels.

A few drawbacks :

* No quote responses, like Whatsapp has for example

* No attachments larger than 8 MB, which makes it impossible to send even a small video you've shot with your recent phone (unless you decrease the film resolution in your phone's settings I guess)

* I've had a few issues with the Android client, such as receiving a notification for a message, opening the app and the message isn't there. No way to force a refresh, so I have to kill the app and open it again. Might have been caused by battery saving mode, not sure.

* Accessing private messages is not very intuitive. Why do you have to go to the main screen first? I don't have many servers, so I'd like to be able to add my closest friends in the server list on the left of the screen, to access our discussions in one click or press.

* Some clever things are part of the client instead of the server, which would be fine if it were consistent between clients, which it's not. I'm thinking of the +:reaction_here: shortcut to quickly add a reaction to the last message in the discussion. It doesn't work with the Android client.
There's a difference between "planning to violate the license" and worrying about what happens if you do because someone didn't pay attention.
Wire does E2E and sync. Each device has its own key though.

https://wire.com/en/blog/key-verification-secure-conversatio...
An all neural on device speech
Yeah, I too don't really understand git. It seems that it was developed without any concern for affording a good mental model of its operation to its users, and thus it is just a complex black box you chant arcane rituals at and hope it doesn't decide to burn your world down. I know I could build a mental model of it if I put enough time into it, but who wants to do that when there's actually useful things to do? So instead when I have to use it to contribute to open source projects I have a sheet of notes with incantations to cover the specific things I've had to do with it in the past.
On Pi Day, Let's Disrupt Our Narrow Notions of Stem
For you, perhaps. However for me I completely disagree.

What you're failing to understand is that this is an entirely subjective rather than objective matter. What works for you isn't proof that it's the same for everyone else.

This is why I've said "The simplicity of Go appeals to me", "Anecdotally I've found" and "YMMV" to made it clear in my post that the subject you're discussing is actually a matter of personal taste.
I am in the same boat. I started using it around 4 years ago when the constant degration of Skype hit a point where I could no longer treat it as my main messenger. Since then, everyone I have regular contact with has become available there, and I haven't looked back. At all. In the last two years it has also become the main hub for a lot of crypto communities, which was very fortunate for me I guess.

I don't use it for privacy, as much as I would like that to be a more prominent feature.
It is my Facebook, and I hope to move to a more private platform eventually, but until then the features, usability, unobtrusiveness and solid clients on all my devices are the reason I'm staying.
Signal/RedPhone did invent its own crypto (the ratchet), didn't they?
DataScience saliency based image segmentation
They don't just allow you to read the source. You can start a competitor to them, using their own source code! The software is under (A)GPL, how is it not "Free Software"?

You're mixing up rights to the software with rights to Signal's name and infrastructure.
Nice! What are the advantages you see with Discord over Slack for the same purpose (if any)? I figured Slack's been around longer and offers most of these things so I was curious what makes people use Discord over it.

FWIW I use both happily.
I once went on holiday in Croatia, on the dalmatian coast. It’s gorgeous, but the peaks and upper slopes of the hills facing the Adriatic are arid bare earth and rock. In some places it look like a moonscape. Apparently all the trees were felled by the Venetians to build their merchant fleets and the hillsides have never recovered. Scotland used to be covered in forests – all those heather-covered uplands were stripped of trees, largely for shipbuilding.
Go used to not even run on Windows, Atom was only on Mac at first. It's not a big deal if it's on one platform currently. You need to get it working on one platform first, and then work on porting it to other platforms.
You actually can configure Bitlocker to accept a passphrase instead but the option isn't easy to find.

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-use-bitlocker-encryption-...
Just saying: with Telegram you need a cellphone to open an account, but you don't need a cellphone to use Telegram.

With Signal you have to use a cellphone. And that's so unsafe and against any reasonable definition of privacy.

Cellphones are tightly closed, data hungry, tracking devices. A IM that force the user to use a cellphone is a BAD at privacy.
How to Prepare for an Interview According to Silicon Valley
Like others here I was in a similar boat. 36, 4 years at a failed startup followed on by 18 months of consulting/contracting.

I can't stress this enough -- put the time in to coding interview prep. Don't hate the game, think of it like a fun challenge. You don't need to know every question out of the box but interviewers will pick up on your confidence, attitude, and willingness to play. I spent about 2 - 4 hours a day for a few weeks doing this and it paid off (5 offers from 7 interviews at tech firms.)

It was difficult to get interviews at some firms (Google wouldn't return my calls) due to the resume. However, ones that do interview are usually impressed and interested in your startup history. Startups are hard!

Good luck!
Can anyone identify the isometric game in the screenshot at the top of this blog post... https://godotengine.org/article/dev-snapshot-godot-3-1-beta-...
AI Big Challenge
Yes you can!
I've dropped out of college after I was offered a job I could only dream of in my early twenties, stayed a couple years, climbed the ladder quickly there and in another company, had some side projects which eventually became startups (they failed, obviously!), went back to work for established companies.

Nowadays whenever I have interviews, most interviewers are actually more interested in my old startups than in my "corporate" experience.

You have to understand that the experience you gained in your startup is what differentiates you from the masses. You have gained a rare skill set that is highly valuable, took some risks and most likely learned much more than anyone who followed the classical route of college to corporation.

Be confident in your skills! If it helps, write down everything you've achieved in your startup, mistakes that were made and how to avoid them.
And as I would recommend to anyone, keep studying : read about new techs, try them on small 2 day projects, refresh your memory every now and then on key concepts in your field.

Good luck my friend!
I'm still not sure which one you are suggesting is "product-oriented" and which one "process-oriented"!
I fly halfway across Japan about every two years for metal concerts in Osaka. Big-name extreme metal acts usually only visit Tokyo & Osaka. About 3-4 years ago Watain was headlining a show. I would have been PISSED, having bought a plane ticket and a hotel, only to find the headline act was cancelled due to some nonsense. \m/>_<\m/
An intrinsically dangerous plane that needs either much more careful piloting (hard to sell...) or software assistance (bad idea) should freak you out even more.
Millennials Are Skipping the Corner Office
Just to check - you think that Bruce Perens, author of the Debian Social Contract, didn't think there was an existing, albeit ill-defined, implicit and non-universal, social contract for free software projects before he wrote that document?

My comments here concern the advocacy from when open source was new, so pointing to Perens' comment from a few days ago doesn't provide insight to what he thought 20 years previous. I'm sure if you ask Raymond about forks now, his answer would be different than it was in 1998.

My observation is that his analysis then was flawed because it made a specific prediction about preventing forking. Things can be influential even if flawed, so confirming that there is a flaw doesn't mean it wasn't influential.
The situation is more complex than that. The US Federal Government can create the raw dollars needed to fund the pensions, and it likely won't crash the dollar. They've been allowing new dollars to flow into the system for years and it hasn't bitten them yet.

The issues are threefold:

1) Printing money reallocates wealth to government-chosen winners instead of consumer-chosen winners. This will destroy some wealth. Although, as long as it does not destroy most of the wealth in the country the currency will likely hold. This issue is made complex because the pensioners were promised wealth way back when, but now the question becomes why are today's taxpayers paying rather than the people who made those promises.

2) We don't know who's wealth is being destroyed (although the numbers suggest it is the Middle Class, imo).

3) The incentive structures created by bailing people out are atrocious. There is no way anyone will make hard decisions and change if they are bailed out. The banks did not meaningfully reform in '08. Cities will not meaningfully reform pensions if they are bailed out way. The rot will accrete as resources continue to be directed to people and institutions who have demonstrated that they do not know how to manage them.
Not something I would expect to be an Australian landscape:
https://markoates.exposure.co/australian-alps-walking-track/...
Multicast was designed exactly for this - same data streamed to many endpoints at the same time. Too bad it's not being more widely used, the bandwidth savings would likely be huge.
Ah, so that's why Google Cloud was down yesterday!
I'm too absorbed by parenting that I dream about side projects I will never do.

Enjoy the free time
> Wanda M. Austin [interim president of the University of Southern California] said she did not believe that admissions officers were aware of the scheme or took part in it, and she described the university as a victim.

Stay tuned for the next phase of the investigation, which will uncover any collusion by university employees who knew about this fraud and did nothing. Hint to investigators: follow the money.
> Your idea of a "user's mental model" might land you into trouble though

If I do do this, I will explicitly lay out the user's metal model in the documentation at the start. Then it will be the user's fault if they can't be bothered to read it.
Emma Haruka Iwao calculates the value of pi to 31T digits
That's because they deliberately block Chromium by scanning navigator.plugins for anything with Chromium in it.
How to build a software development team?
I think this is a large majority of Git users. The last company I worked at had 30 good developers, 1 of which I think really deeply understood git.

So I guess 97% of users don't really get git.
It just doesn't exist yet. There is a possibility that AMD might start supporting HDR this year. Intel is working on it. Nvidia hasn't gotten much further than https://www.x.org/wiki/Events/XDC2016/Program/xdc-2016-hdr.p... . It'll come, but we're not there yet.

Mind, even on Windows, it's pretty messy and you have to do a lot of figuring out and hacking platform layers to make it work.
We should also ban kitchen knives because users have repeatedly stabbed themselves in the eye.
I'm currently using Windows with WSL + wsltty + tmux + terminal vim with no issues.

Things are really fast and stable. I often have 10 Vim instances open across half a dozen tmux sessions. Each one takes up about 8mb of RAM with ~40 plugins doing everything I could ever ask for in a code editor. The only time they get closed is when Windows decides to reboot but then I can automatically restore the tmux sessions with 1 hot key.

I switched to Vim last month after I found VSCode to be unusable for editing a 1mb a markdown file (it used over 50% of my i5 3.2ghz quadcore just idling with the file open). I wrote about the experience at https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/vim-is-saving-me-hours-of-wor....

Haven't looked back since.
Shouldn't the monitoring websites be able to check the DB status for you before you even look at that red text? :)
Machine Identity for IoT Communications
We have Briggo[1] here in Austin. The one I used is in a private large office building, and it's actually really convenient, since I'll generally order by app from the parking lot and be able to pick it up when I walk in. I think the coffee is a lot better than the normal "Coffee from the multigallon thermos in the cafeteria". I've heard that the biggest part of their R&D investment wasn't actually in the arm, but rather in figuring out how to get the machine to do as much of its own maintenance as possible. They could use more investment in their mobile app, which they've redesigned a couple times but which is still horrible.

[1] https://briggo.com/
> It seems that it was developed without any concern for affording a good mental model of its operation to its users

I think Linus' design goal was something that runs as quickly/efficiently as possible on large repositories.

> it is just a complex black box you chant arcane rituals at and hope it doesn't decide to burn your world down

My feeling too!
I use the browser version and the stylus browser extension to set the font to Roboto and make the text actually pass the chrome inspectors accessibility guidelines
Braintree Marketplace solution has been sunsetted
No, I published it with KDP and Createspace as usual. I just wasn't very happy with it, including Createspace print quality.
Does anyone have experience with how Krita compares to Corel Painter?

I've long been using Painter for hobbyist digital painting, but I'm not very happy about the price, the occasionally shoddy stability, and the in-app purchase upsell Corel is nowadays pushing in every upgrade. I don't use the crazy artistic brushes very much because they're so slow — just looking for something with a decent set of customizable gouache/acrylic type brushes.
So true. People still sit in front of desktop SO much. Why can't whatsapp come out with a client that is not total crap and linked to a phone?
No one is taxed again and again every
year after they buy ..say(and this is
hypothetical)..a pace maker

A pacemaker doesn't need weekly trash pickups forever.
I grew up nearby and we never called them that, either the Snowies or the High Country (depending on which state you were from/talking about)
If I had the choice between a 'typical journey by car' vs a 'plane with a bunch of faults' I'd definitely prefer the typical journey by car.

A 'plane with a bunch of faults' could range from a non-issue to an imminent crash, a typical journey by car tends to do what it is supposed to do, it is the 'exceptional journeys by car' that are the problematic ones.

Air travel is safer statistically because most planes do not have 'a bunch of faults', when you start out with faulty planes the stats will rapidly turn against you.
List of Conversation Starters
Making Food Delivery Profitable – Menu, Packaging, Delivery, Unit Economics [pdf]
Is that a neo Armstrong jet cyclone Armstrong cannon?
A friend of mine actually suggested trying to generate a hacker-news-comment language model next.. sounds like a fun project.

I’ll have to look and see if there’s an archive of them available.
Sounds like garden variety ADHD. Been dealing with this my whole life...
Enjoy the time with your children too. The memories you build with them today will last a lifetime, and will be much more valuable than any side project you're dreaming of
The desktop app is electron junk that lacks basic features like changing spellchecking language and there's no pure web client like Whatsapp for instance. I also think it lacks some features of the mobile client like creating new groups and adding new contacts (or at least I haven't figured out how to do it). When I install the client on a new computer I can't access the history of the messages from the phone for a reason that eludes me.

Frankly 90% of my frustrations with Signal come from this client, the experience on mobile is better, although still far from perfect. I'm not a fan of pure web clients but web.whatsapp.com is lightyears ahead of Signal's electron bloated and under-featured mess.

The Android client crops the image when I take a picture through the app. No other application does that so I don't really know why it does it. I suspect it's a bug or maybe a bad setting I flipped by mistake but I can't figure out what's going on.

As far as I can tell when you get a new phone the only way to synchronize message history is to create a local backup on one phone, write down the ~24 digit passphrase, transfer the backup by yourself on the new phone then load it from there. If there's a simpler way I haven't found it.

Also I don't think you can move your "secret key" to the new phone, so you have to re-validate your safety number with them. Maybe there's a way to do all that but if I as a technical user wasn't able to figure it out while actively looking for it I have little hope for the average Facebooker.

There's also no support for WhatsApp-style stickers, URL preview, Youtube embedding and all these bells and whistles that I personally don't care for but I'm sure would be missed by many WhatsApp/messenger users.
Isn't that what "just block all traffic from The Netherlands" would mean?
I think they mean “hock” in the pawn off sense of the word and not intense falconry.
It doesn't convert to LaTeX, it's intended for creative writing, not for academic writing, and LaTeX plays no role in this market. LaTeX is really just used in academic writing.
> F.T.C. officials, who spent the past year investigating whether Facebook violated the 2011 agreement, are now weighing the sharing deals as they negotiate a possible multibillion-dollar fine. That would be the largest such penalty ever imposed by the trade regulator.

A multibillion dollar fine? That's great, but even greater would be to put Facebook's exces behind bars. A CEO shouldn't walk away with a stuffed bank account after years of criminal offences, violating the privacy of millions of people all around the world and then not take any personal responsibility for it in front of our jurisdiction. The fine is attributed to Facebook, but there also needs to be a heft penalty for the people who ran Facebook and that is the executive team. Jail terms must be given. In the long term this will set an important precedent and detract possible future offenders!
I think Discord is slowing eating away all other form of online communication as it can be used for such a variety of situations and their API makes it very customizable.

The main issue I see is the culture. Discord's community has quite an opposite culture as Slack (free time vs work time) for instance. Being able to have multiple Discord handles could solve that.
I used to think that as well. I've been monitoring the fallout of several labs that were recently hacked and basically mismanaged patient data for millions of people, most of whom have no idea their data was compromised. I have yet to see any of the labs punished. The most recent that I know of was LabCorp.
Look for a video on YouTube called Git Happens. I've found it fairly effective with my coworkers. It doesn't go over the command syntax, but instead dives into a logical overview of the underlying data structures.
Given Microsoft's response, it seems this isn't new. I'm in charge of my company's security so now I'm a bit concerned. I mandated the use of Bitlocker with TPM across the business but no pre-authentication measures.

How accessible is this attack to the common person? Note that I am concerned about curious thieves as opposed to three letter agencies. I believe I would still be correct in saying that it's still really hard for your average person to extract data from a plain-TPM encrypted Bitlocker.

Are there commercially available TPM adapters that make the attachment easier for example? It looks like their attachment technique could be refined with custom hardware.

It is troubling to see that Bitlocker+TPM is essentially just obfuscation though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAhrbAK_34w

Yeah, that's totally closer to punk than metal...
This is really a very complex question. For what kind of game? For which mobile platforms? What is your past experience? Have you made a game before? What languages have you worked with? etc etc etc.

Godot uses it's own scripting language, or C# as a second class option. Are those languages you want to work with? Would you rather make the game from scratch? Would Unity or Unreal be better? Would a framework like monogame be better? If you are just targeting IOS maybe using Swift or Objective C would be easier and perform better.
PrivateStorage.io: A secure and privacy-focused cloud storage solution
Sprint Review: Shitty to Great
Having written my own git client, I can tell you that "the most complicated part will be the command-line arguments parsing logic" doesn't go away. I wouldn't be surprised to wake up one day and find someone published a proof that NP != P, and the proof involved trying to parse the git command line.