skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It was well-intentioned. For a time, Keybase provided users the option to upload their private keys so they didn't have to maintain them themselves. You could just log into Keybase and send signed messages, decrypt messages, etc without the hassle of managing your keys locally. It was definitely a bad idea and I think they dropped it a few months/years later, but it at least wasn't totally out of left field.
No, they didn't. There is an option to have Keybase sync a [backup] copy of your private key(s) between your devices for you but the key is encrypted by you. And, none of their stuff like chat or git etc. depends on using/accessing those keys in anyway (they built out their own domain-applicable pki for that—in other words, chat doesn't use pgp). It’s just a convenience option for those who want it and it’s not the default.
Keybase's side of the announcement: https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-joins-zoom

> What the Keybase team will be doing

> Initially, our single top priority is helping to make Zoom even more secure. There are no specific plans for the Keybase app yet. Ultimately Keybase's future is in Zoom's hands, and we'll see where that takes us. Of course, if anything changes about Keybase’s availability, our users will get plenty of notice.

> So, our shortest-term directive is to significantly improve our security effectiveness, by working on a product that's that much bigger than Keybase. We can't be more specific than that, because we're just diving in.

They're not even making the usual "Zoom is committed to keeping Keybase alive" promise :(
Keybase Joins Zoom
DAO:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organ...
Yeah for the few people in the world who actually used Keybase and understood (at least partially) why it was a neat thing... most of those people are also those who have been following the Zoom debacle, and will likely consider abandoning the platform.
Cloud migration isn’t only a hosting change
> Zoom Acquires Keybase and Announces Goal of Developing the Most Broadly Used Enterprise End-to-End Encryption Offering

So is this real end-to-end encryption, or Zoom-brand "end"-to-our-server-to-"end" encryption?
Why the heck would "the best" people from overseas want to work in the US?
So does this mean getting marketed sketchy cryptocurrencies during your teleconferences, sending your PGP keys to random servers in other countries, ... or both?

Relevant to the acquisition, perhaps: https://web.archive.org/web/20191122031523/https://github.co...
Maybe Zoom is trying to solve that with help from Keybase?
For most, sure. How else do you "exit"? It's not a great time for an IPO. Nor for raising money.

So either you're self-sustaining and are in it for the long haul, or you're looking to get acquired.
Meh. I think you can assume the average person is casually well-meaning. You can't assume the average person is trying to help you with all/most of their actions.

I don't think you can assume the average person is honest/transparent. You can't assume the person you're negotiating your salary with is going to tell you if your offer is much too low. You can't assume HR isn't going to lie about the reason the fired somebody. You can't assume the company will give you any heads up if they're thinking about firing you.

A lot of people offering "feedback," especially public, especially if it's negative, are just angry venters. And this goes both directions E.g. Glassdoor.

Not saying it's good to have a chip on your shoulder about any of this, but it definitely shouldn't be swept under the rug.
Firm Tied to Cambridge Analytica 'Configured' NHSX Contact Tracing App
Although he was a bad guy, doublecrossing him was a terrible choice and we’re feeling the consequences of that hubris.

That said what keeps the west from invading NKorea aren’t the nukes. It’s the katyusha and other conventional armament that would rain down on Seoul a few Kms across the border.
I'll take what you're drinking ;-)
Nuxt.js over Vue.js: when should you use it and why
How can they be so obvlivious though? Their own blog post doesn't even mention the tarnished reputation Zoom has acquired lately.

A lot of people will stop developing integrations for Keybase because of this. It's sad.
I have no doubt that there's rampant human rights abuse in NK but where have you seen photos of their abuse? I'd imagine they'd be very careful about that.
> ... or to be less facetious, modern web/frontend development is a genuine skill set that benefits from experience and knowledge.

I mean, there's a strong argument that it has become too complex for no particularly good reason. It is _far_ more complex today than a decade or so ago, and the results in many cases are arguably worse for the user.

If you compare the _average_ modern react-y website to a Ruby on Rails one with minimal or no Javascript from 2007 or so, the react-y one is far more difficult (and slower) to work on, but is it really delivering extra value to the end user? There are exceptions, of course, but I think for most CRUD web apps things have gone in a very bad direction.
I remember there was a whole Linux distro written in XUL. Can't remember its name for the life of me, but from memory it was vaguely based on RedHat and was targeting kiosks and internet appliances. I remember setting it up for my parents circa 2001 as it looked fool proof and tamper proof.
Sure Einstein's work was built upon some previous work, in the same way the Wolfram's work is building on pre-existing work.

This doesn't change the fact that Einstein's approach was a radical departure from the prevailing mainstream. Just as Wolfram's is today.

Trying to classify Einstein as an incrementalist on the basis of his work being built upon previous work would then imply that Wolfram is also an incrementalist because he too is inspired by earlier work in the same vein as his, as the article states. But clearly we're talking about something different here.
We are preparing to sell our current house and buy a new one. Our realtor (so grain of salt here) said that its currently a buyers market and that he expects it to remain that way at least through fall. But honestly, no one knows and there is no way to know.
I get that it's nice to know exactly which version something is running on, but something i have found myself wanting when writing a small cli-script for downloading youtube videos, is something like Deno allowing me to run somebody's script, or somebody else to run mine, without fear of it damaging my system. But then also with the rendering engine so it could be just "deno run http://host/myscript.ts --allow-net=googlevideo.net,youtube.com --allow-write=." but it allows me to render a more friendly UI.
I wish somebody a lot more competent than me would make such a tool from gecko
A shame Tyson Food's has so many political connections.
React token-based authentication module with Axios Interceptors
Using OAuth 2.0 Authentication framework, An all-in-one tutorial on how to create the authentication part of your React app.
Keybase helped me to identify a trend in the software industry: using a pretty UI to cover up the disruption of an open ecosystem with a closed, centralized replacement. Keybase seemed cool on the face of it - making encryption easier is a laudible goal, and PGP certainly could use the improvement. But, thanks to Keybase, now I ask different questions upfront. Beware the Keybase formula:

1. Integrates with an existing, open ecosystem

2. May have open-source clients, but server is closed source and does not federate

3. Pretty UI and good marketing

4. VC funded
What I love most about these small engineering companies making high tech niche products is their no thrills, stuck in the 90's websites.

Huge contrast to dark pattern based websites dedicated to selling stuff to consumers.

I guess they just don't bother since it'll make no difference to their bottom line. They're well known in their niche and probably as the only go-to solution for this kind of problem, I imagine the likes of Intel and TSMC have them on speed dial so their products sell without marketing or fancy websites.
Current discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23102430
Can you compile, run and test your code online as well?
1) Give yourself time, not too much and not too little, to spend alone. Then spend as much as you can with or talking to others who would return the gesture.

2) Most work, especially in tech, isn't that important and won't change anything, so reduce your sacrifice for some company. Whatever SaaS thing you're working on to save small business owners 5 minutes a day just isn't worth your mental health, and some aspects of American industrialism is toxic af. I used to think of Apple as a world changing product designer, but later I realized that it's just a company with a vaguely interesting story, and one that does make well-designed objects, but most people could do without their iPhones for a long time and be better off.
If I can add a layman perspective to Jiggawatts excellent analysis - since there's a very similar issue happening in economics, it may be a bit more approachable.

Economics is also full of theories that try to explain the entire complex system from partial observations, and people arguing furiously with each other, in what for a large part in academia is a contrived nonsense that is practically useless for real world issues, and mainly serves signalling purposes.

How this manifests itself there, is that they will take some time series of some kind of data - price of oil over a few years say - fit the equation of a straight line to it - and the less responsible ones then yell "solved". But if you took a longer portion of that data, went back several decades say, you would see that it is bouncing up and down like a yo-yo, and actually the only equation that is pretty much guaranteed not to fit it, is a straight line. Unless you take a short enough period. Or to put it another way, with a short enough ruler you can fit any curve.

Wolfram, and his opponents, are essentially doing the same thing, only with multi-dimensional math, where the curve in question looks a bit more complex than a straight line, but fundamentally its the same thing. Which is why it matters much more than outsiders may appreciate that the model isn't an exact fit.

Lurking behind all of this of course, is that one time in physics when the data and the theory were (within the limits of then technology) a pretty exact fit, and still the theory was completely wrong - epicycles.
Counterpoint: Michael Bloomberg recently spent almost half a billion dollars trying to convince people to make him a presidential candidate. How did that work for him?

What a lot of people don’t seem to understand is that propaganda doesn’t cause beliefs, it focuses and amplified beliefs that preexist at least in nascent form. The Koch brothers would have no power if there weren’t people ready for their kind of message. In fact this is a good example. The Koch Brothers were against the Trumpian turn in Republican politics and spent heavily against it. How did that work out for them?

Sorry money == power is too facile.
> Ultimately Keybase's future is in Zoom's hands

Well, that definitely translates to uncertainty and ultimately the death of Keybase.
No. I have a good memory of how to find it again.
Sorry for slow reply; I ended up getting into the exact same conversation with someone else about this, so I blogged it: https://medium.com/opendatacoop/challenges-in-community-data...

> add their data themselves

I touched on this :-)
Here in the Midwest, everything except 1) franchise stores and 2) single-proprietor stores have gone to curbside pickup. They invented a whole pickup process at our grocery store, with shipping containers in the parking lot containing staged carts with numbers, masked-and-gloved young people filling and shuttling carts to the container. They text you when your cart is ready. Drive over and park in a numbered space and reply with your space number. Somebody comes out of the container with your cart and you pop your trunk.

Cars coming and going all day. Works well for everybody (with a car).
GCC 10.1 Released
> Or, to put it another way, why does the collective imagination seem to be more captured by Tesla (and SpaceX to a degree) than The Boring Company?

Point taken, but I don’t think the name “The Boring Company” is going to inspire many people even if it was a making weed-burgers for baseball fans.
Then why acquire? Why not just hire as a consultant?
GCC 10 Release Series Changes, New Features, and Fixes
We Chat, They Watch: How International Users Build Chinese Censorship Apparatus
They’re not oblivious but two things; you don’t bite the hand that feeds and it’s easier to get someone to see your side of things when you agree with them. Confrontation will not help to fix Zoom’s culture of insecurity.
Sure, but why prefer a law over a technical solution?
> I'd rather read up on the JVM which is frankly more powerful and interesting than the Elisp interpretor.

Would it be possible to implement Elisp on top of the JVM? I mean in a way, so Emacs can use it instead of its own VM in a backward compatible way, while at the same time allowing programming Emacs in other JVM languages.
Yeah I really want to see him do that with a mobile app. With a website it _might_ work in some scenarios but on mobile, having no shared UI is practically impossible (while it is merely extremely inconvenient on the web).
People are expressing they will stop using Keybase because of this. That's fine, probably a good idea.

But reading this, Zoom+Keybase will make sure of this themselves. This press release indicates that this is a 100% acquihire. There's only talk about what the Keybase people will be tasked to do, and there isn't any talk about Keybase's services in the first place. There's no real reason Zoom would be interested in keeping Keybase's services up and running anyway.

Let's hope they make it a swift death. Shame about Keybase, loved using it so far. It's somewhat encouraging to see a change in direction for Zoom, too. Hope the acquihire works out.
I like that too. I naturally dislike marketing tricks, and enjoy seemingly old or bland but technically worthy things.
Cryo and Westwood's 16-bit Dune games
This sounds like an acquihire, or am I reading it wrong? If so, I doubt anyone at keybase is necessarily thrilled about this.

I’ve enjoyed keybase for many years, it made a lot of annoyances of encryption and key management easy. I particularly liked its encrypted git repo feature—now I’m struggling to think of an easy alternative.
I'm pretty sure that all of the people you note had middle-class to upper-middle-class parents, so potentially you are proving Piketty's point.
From the outside, your comment reads as "I like him, I identify with him, I won't question him."
I don’t necessarily read it that way. Keybase is 100% functional and has worked well for a long time. Zoom needs people who know how to make modern client software and chat if they want to compete with the Slacks and Teams, etc. You can’t even screen share on wayland... it’s that bad. If keybase ultimately gets secure video, and zoom a security architecture overhaul, how is that a bad thing?
The 'Back to work movement' just seems like a way to push people off of unemployment.
> If the choice is saving capitalism or saving 450,000 lives, I choose lives. ... How about you?

capitalism, hands down. Far more than 450k will die/suffer in the event of complete economic collapse. And yes, capitalism has its thorns, but generally it has brought more wealth and prosperity to people than any other economic model in history.
The obituary I found mentioned Simenon as an influence, which makes sense.
In my experiences, they absolutely do signal that, so our anecdata cancel out.

Maybe this article will provide a starting point to shed light on the fact that AirPods have certainly become status symbols: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-airpods-most-important...

I don't really know how else to illustrate that fact. Maybe there are peer-reviewed sociological or ethnographic studies out there that will specifically state this fact, but I haven't found any. But the world exists outside of the contents of peer-reviewed science.
> Should we expect anyone to just jump in cold with minimal experience and not find it difficult?

My take on this is that the author had some (relevant) programming experience and thought it would transfer better, hence the frustration.

That was my experience, as someone in the same boat (computational scientist trying to put together a webapp). I have a CS degree and my job involves a lot of diverse coding, from low-level stuff to interface with hardware to graphics/ML/data stuff, not to mention gluing together other people's code.

I nevertheless found it very frustrating to get started with web dev. There seem to be a million slightly different ways to do things and people have strong opinions about which ones are best, so it's hard to settle on authoritative source, especially one that's up to date. Many tutorials bounce between basic web stuff (which I wanted) and basic programming (which makes me zone out). Plus, there's a lurking fear that I'm gonna screw something up in a way that exposes a bunch of data or costs me a fortune in hosting (etc) while trying to make something that I sketched out on three pieces of paper.

This seems a little different from bioinformatics, where a lot of the complexity is baked into the subject matter. For background, textbooks certainly vary in how they present information, but they all pretty much agree: Molecular Biology of the Cell isn't going to tell you that DNA is where it's at, with RNA being a fad vs. The Cell claiming that DNA is outmoded and it's all RNA, baby!
AMD Ryzen 3 3100 and Ryzen 3 3300X Offering Great Budget Linux CPU Performance
Funny thing is, those rails and simple Django apps are just as effective today as they were 10 years ago. In fact, not letting your app get bogged down in the mess that is modern front ends is likely a competitive advantage these days. Keep it simple. Django and Rails are the best they have ever been. Most software is about data, not front ends. It takes dedicated teams to tame “modern” front ends. Let the data show you the way and avoid front end stuff until you absolutely can’t. Maybe, after you need something to do with a lot of VC money or you can justify a certain UX in your app.
I was insufficiently precise in my description, but having implemented it in one (admittedly simple) codec I can assure you it works. ::grin::

When this kind of rolling keyframe is used the encoder needs to track the reference structure of the video and not make any references into the "dirty zone"-- this includes constraining coding modes so that no entropy context leaks. This can be aided by (or necessitate the use of) 'tiled'/'sliced' entropy coding features that some codecs have for parallelism reasons.

There is, of course, a coding performance loss-- especially if the video pans against the update boundary.
We all have different views on this, of course. For example, in my proxies, I filter .biz and .info, as spammers and malware authors were able to acquire thousands of those domains super cheap. I probably miss out on a decent site here or there, but its a small price for me to pay.
Because keybase obviously needs money and zoom has a lot of it right now..
I've used Keybase for a long time but I never quite understood the purpose of it. It never "just worked" for me and my experience was mostly chats being unreadable, my account having to be reset, and a lot of new functionality that seemed like it did what other products already did, just not as good.

I always liked the idea and the people behind it seemed like good people, but I'm sad to say I won't miss a worse version of Slack, Bitcoin and Dropbox.
Gigantic Elastic Search cluster - according to Elastic the largest in Europe (as of 2 years ago) - used in production. Broke again and again on AWS. We needed more shards than AWS supports. Moved to bare metal again.
So if I'm reading this right... the participants of the DAO can band together and sell their company to a company as well? It looks like a DAO just requires some kind of cryptocurrency to participate, and then the participants get control over the operations of the DAO. So ownership is transferable at any time by these parties.
This is precisely why Zoom is acquiring Keybase. Zoom seeks to become the single "remote work tool", challenging Dropbox, et al. directly.

I'm particularly disenchanted with the growth of these multipurpose tools, but I am not their target audience. (Nor, I suspect, are many HN participants, but this is a baseless guess.) I suppose I'm more of an adherent to so-called "UNIX philosophy"--the best, single-purpose tool for each task, preferably that can be combined with its like for a solution customizable to how a specific user gets work done.
Is anyone else imagining a dystopian future where employers force you to use online code editors?
It must depend on where you live - Utah does have a basic registration to be a beekeeper, but that is all. Fill out a form once a year, and you're good.
In my current company, we have a "calendar week" based schedule. Everything is planned based on that time segmentation principle. For example, "the start of production is planned for calendar week 45" - that is it, no month, no quarter no date - simply, the 45th week of the year.
Relevant question with answers: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/61375629/allow-cross-ori...
There are two checks that the conductor does. One is to ensure that all the doors are "platformed", i.e. won't open into the tunnel. This is done by pointing at a striped bar hanging from the ceiling. They lean out the window and point because it's one of those "hacks" that makes compliance with the procedure more likely. (Kind of like how checklists dramatically increased aviation safety.) The second thing they do is check that the train isn't dragging anything when it's leaving the station. People do get caught in the doors (usually their clothes or bags), and you don't read about them dying because the conductor is paying close attention and stops the train.

Can you engineer sensors to do this? Absolutely. Machine vision is getting better every year, but these procedures date from a time when digital cameras and computers didn't even exist. They work well, don't require maintenance, and are simple. An engineered sensor-based solution would be expensive, would break often in the dirty environment of the tunnels, and would be pretty imperfect.

So I think a pretty good engineering compromise has been made here. Going to the moon happened because there was an unlimited budget and we only had to do it a few times. Seeing if your train is platformed correctly and that it's not dragging any customers to their death has less funding and has to happen thousands of times a day. Hence, we have a person in the train to do that, instead of a machine learning sensor network.
-They also have the dubious honor of making the first 28-bit minicomputer, if the story I was told over beers at a geekfest at my alma mater holds true.

Apparently, in an effort to gain market share in the Soviet block (Which cloned ND products like there was no tomorrow anyway) without falling foul of COCOM rules, they neutered a few 32-bit NORDs and duly exported them east.

Presumably the COCOM regulations of the time said 'No 32 bit exports!'...
This is funny because Norsk Data computers were used in VNIIPAS ( All Union Scientific Research Institute for Applied Computerized Systems) for first Soviet X.25 network, connected to the rest of the world via Austria.