skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I got a few comments since I love your blogs and opinion. I work on Whonix and am excited that you're commenting on it.

A minimum Debian is grml [1], 150-350MB, which Whonix uses as a base.

But by the time we're done adding packages and KDE, it's not minimal anymore. We use a popular GNU/Linux distro (instead of, say, hardened gentoo) because 1) Lots of eyes on a bigger project is more secure than few eyes on a smaller project, and 2) Bad or missing usability/UX hurts security: these systems are used by journalists and dissidents, not the Unix and computer security trained. The trick is making a system that moderately educated users can get work done on, without letting them shoot themselves in the foot.

VMs have their problems, but VirtualBox inside an average Windows install is harder to exploit than an average Windows install alone. Whonix can also run on dedicated hardware or inside a dedicated/minimal/portable host OS. Running inside QubesOS, the Xen-based (everything is isolated) security focused desktop OS, is a mid-term goal.

Additionally, as resources (that is, volunteers) grow, builds of Whonix based on other distros/desktops/hardware will appear. To see you post on our forum [2] or github issues [3], lending your experience with PORTAL, would be a dream! Let's talk stream isolation. Or just voice your concerns and we'll try to defend our choices.

---

Ditto on Pond, which is weird since Appelbaum is behind it, but apparently they don't want to start from scratch (Pond was just a README last time I checked).

I have big hopes for TIMB, BitMessage, and the new (crossplatform) TextSecure. Hopefully redphone will receive the same treatment as TextSecure. Me and the lead Whonix developer tried to set up a crossplatform secure voice chat over Jitsi... an hour later we gave up.

Icebird + TorBirdy is just barely becoming a reality. A GPG capable email client that doesn't give away your time zone is big news in this world. Don't get me started on losing all your bookmarks when you update the tor browser bundle! We got a long way to go.

[1]: https://grml.org/
[2]: https://www.whonix.org/forum/index.php?board=5.0
[3]: https://github.com/Whonix/Whonix/issues
No: we don't have any revenue

Revenue is not my goal. I built Poemia http://poemia.com with the goal to be the best publishing platform for poets. I launched it 2 weeks ago. If there will be any revenue along the way it will make me very happy :)
Crowd-serfing (2013)
Detroit's Startup Ecosystem is Missing 3 Things
Minor quibble: the Xbox was started under Gates, not Ballmer. It was publicly announced 2 months after Gates stepped down as CEO.

I think this fits with your larger point however: Ballmer was not a product visionary.
The linked article is a terrific inside look at the S.E.C.'s efforts to define illegal market manipulation -- and failing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7328572
Let's play "spot the spook" in this thread..
I suspect that a subscription system would make some very happy, but I'm an informal blogger and I'd prefer to pay a bit more to use them when I need them.

As far as feature requests go, I suggest keeping it super simple for a little while until you get a sense of which ones are "I have an idea" vs. "I can't use this unless".
Very good tip and something I find myself screwing up on projects all the time. A good example is with scroll views. There are quite a lot of parameters than usually need to be set (zoom scale, user interaction, multi touch, delegate). I can't count the number of times I've been debugging why it isn't working only to find I've mistakenly set a parameter in IB and code that are conflicting.
That's true. I don't think that is evidence that "creepy" simply means "I wouldn't hit that." Body language and other things can indicate that a person behaves in a certain way, without anyone saying a word.
This will allow the user to create an iBeacon with your own specified major and minor values. Very interesting read!
There are many interesting points made and dealt with in this article but what's weird/wrong/suspicious about a CEO using IRC?

Did he say something specifically stupid there? Or is the very medium tainted?
Read the article again with:

s/Visual Studio/emacs/g
s/MSSQL/Sleepycat/g
s/C[#]/emacs lisp/g

:-)

Disclosure: I work at MSFT, but I just thought this was fun.
He experienced the deletions after returning to his home, in the UK.

I certainly might be. It's interesting to consider though.
Perovskite is also common in "the planet": 93% of the mantle is silicate perovskite, according to Wikipedia. I'm not sure the geological abundance (accessible or not) is the determining factor in the cost of solar cells made with these materials.

Edit: actually, it seems from the more detailed descriptions that the perovskites useful in solar cells have a totally different chemical formula from the common geological ones, so your point about abundance of silicon needs to be measured against whatever elements these (presumably synthetic) perovskites contain.
Really love the game. The puzzle mechanics are interesting, and I picked up the logics fairly intuitively. The ambiance and art sells it. The intro is cleverly set up, but the story about the father politician is a bit confusing.
Ukraine mobilizes troops after Russia's 'declaration of war'
I read through the whole article before asking myself, "Just who is this author, and what is the author's background?" The article byline reports, "Suzanne Mettler, a professor of government at Cornell University, is the author of Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream."

These days, when I look at suggestions for national policy for the United States (which show up here on Hacker News with alarming frequency, even despite the differing topic emphasis of this online community), I really like to hear from other countries about what is already working in public policy on the same topic. Is there some country in the world that does a better job in setting higher education policy than the United States? If so, which one? What improvements can United States policy gain by studying the example of other countries? As an American who has lived abroad for years during my adult life, I find it tedious to consider policy suggestions here in the country of my birth without reality-checking them by the experience of other countries. In this light, what we should consider as we ponder the suggestions in the article kindly submitted here?

(Disclosure: I have a college degree, gained at a state university in the United States at the time the article author identifies as a time of policy transition. I have close relatives who have never completed college degrees, and I wonder what factors matter most for college degrees being accessible, and also what factors matter most for college degrees being useful to their possessors and to the broader society.)
http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1zct8q/mobilization_uk...
No-bullshit guide to linear algebra
I'll add a 5th class. Those who pay, can't use the crap they get for some reason, so torrent a functional version. I fit this category often. Got out a Sopranos series. DVDs wouldn't play over airplay for some DRM reason, and torrenting was quicker than ripping. Another time it was getting a Windows install onto a MacBook Air was so painful that a torrent was easier than some horrid workaround that involved a 4 hour drive to get a disc and a disc drive as no legal method of getting a download was available (from memory it was Widows 7 about a year and a half ago, but have struck the issue of having no legal download available with legacy Widows versions at other times too).
Micro UX
> There are many interesting points made and dealt with in this article but what's weird/wrong/suspicious about a CEO using IRC?

It contradicts the image of a corporate heavyweight, who by definition would want to avoid making informal remarks that might be misinterpreted by stockholders or the public. In some contexts, informal remarks by a corporate insider could be taken to suggest an intent to manipulate the public's perception of the company and therefore its market valuation.

> Did he say something specifically stupid there? Or is the very medium tainted?

Answers: Not necessarily, and yes, definitely.
Chlorine is available in quantity, but fluorine, bromine, and iodine are not. Bromine and iodine are actually quite rare - there's more uranium than either of those.

Lead is also somewhat rare.

> All common and cheap.

Exactly what I'm talking about. In the small quantities we use currently - common and cheap. In the quantities needed to make energy? Not common at all.

> So, no, there shouldn't be any supply problem.

Actually, if that's what it's made of there will be huge supply problems.

Based on all this I suspect this is the last we will hear of this technology. It works in the lab, but is not practical at scale.

Although maybe those elements are just used at ppm levels, and the bulk of this is silicon, then this could work.

> but I doubt this would involve anywhere near the volume that's used in (e.g.) lead-acid car batteries.

To provide energy at country level scales? It would use WAY more. I once calculated that there is not enough lead on the planet to make enough batteries to store enough energy for overnight use. (In the context of batteries to buffer the diurnal nature of solar energy.)
Bitcoin Itself May Live or Die, but Cryptocurrencies Will Live On
It's a single guy, except for the music.
I definitely side with the author. Any time we've used IB it's always ended up in regret. Refactoring, odd layout issues, iPad / iPhone management has always made it a headache.

It's probably a testate to how good UIKit is to code with directly that makes it attractive.

Though whatever side you fall on, I think it's worth appreciating you have the choice. I remember when doing some brief Windows Phone development, and seemed all you had to work with was some XML API to design your interfaces. It was awful.
interesting list, thanks for the info. someone made a portal on debian though that's why i mentioned it. boot2docker is actually a tinycorelinux, with a 24 mb base system image.

I gave up on Jitsi fairly quickly(this from a person that wrote actually hacked together a proof of concept skypekit plugin for pidgin). It's slow, it randomly locks up for no apparent reason, and well as you said, it's java. So I went back to pidgin.

You're absolutely right about pidgin and it's technical debt though. The only way it can be repaid is by a complete rewrite. I'm still holding my breath for stable gui bindings, and a 1.0 rust release.

what you're saying about vm's and containers about security is true, yes. But it's not about security. It's about leaking information, and comfort. The tor browser bundle is all about comfort, and being "safe enough". If you're rooted it neither tor browser bundle, nor tor chat bundle will help you. The reason I brought this up is because i think in theory it should be possible to make a bundle that allows you to run desktop apps inside of that vm/container setup with a fully configured pf tables setup so that particular instances connection will fully go through the parents tor node

Pond looks interesting, but i'm still a little of split opinion whether things that later target end user desktop application should ultimately be written in go.
> My experience is not that people have prejudices against females.

Are you female? Because if you're not, you're probably not aware of them. Ask some of your female colleagues about it sometime.
There's two kinds of video on the web.

If I'm going to watch a movie, would I prefer to use VLC? Sure.

But do I want to download 10 second YouTube clips? God no.
> What's your proof that such prejudices exist

Ask any female programmer about it sometime. It'll be enlightening for you.
> The compiler could have prevented 'X' by not permitting "function == int" comparisons. That's 1/5.

0 is also a special case litteral for the null pointer, and function names are valid in pointer contexts, so I'm not even sure that "f == 0" is badly typed.
> By off duty, I mean fully in department issued uniform, badge, gun, and radio with full police authority same as on duty.

Don't you understand that an off-duty police officer may not be in uniform, that that's illegal? In some jurisdictions an off-duty police officer is expected to carry his gun, but he may not exercise police powers.

In short, when a police officer goes off shift, he loses his police powers. Being a policeman is a job, not an identity.
"First, let me be clear that Intel doesn’t participate in the NSA programs described in recent news reports. Intel does not participate in anyone’s efforts to decrease security in technology. We don’t provide methods for unauthorized access to our products….we don’t create back doors."

To me, that statement strongly suggests that Intel is participating in some sort of NSA program. What that is, I have no idea.
Wonderfully verbose and difficult to repeat and document vs easy to automate\document is another way of putting the gui vs cli
I use it in a very limited capacity of keeping in touch with people I knew in the 90s on IRC. But I drop out of doing even that every now and then when I need to focus on other things, because IRC tends to be a drag on my productivity sometimes.

I also try to sit in freenode channels that intersect my interests, but I'm not anywhere near as active in them as I was back in the day. But that's where all the good developer-related channels are now.
Here's the link:

http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...
Hey Zac,

If you can be un-furious long enough to consider that you might have a blind-spot, here's what I can tell you about the company I am referencing:

- they are well-loved
- it's highly likely that you are their customer or know someone that is
- it's flat, not tiered (there's no "supervisors")
- the system I'm describing is working specifically because those people that pick up are carefully trained and well paid North Americans that are actually subject-domain experts

The key detail and the reason I'm replying is because I know that what I described is working and you're not allowing yourself to imagine the possibility that it could actually work just fine.
Because it fits the narrative.

In other words, "The Rule of Cool."
As he explained, it was a joke.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/29/the-humor-test/
Get Any city weather in ruby in 8 lines of code
See arduboy, covered previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7325486

http://bateske.com/arduboy/
> But off-duty officers are just civilians? They have no added powers to use force against citizens?

That's correct. Police officers can only exercise police powers while on duty, and when they go off shift, they become civilians.
This is like saying we'll never run out of coal because carbon is so prevalent: it's not the right form. Silicon purification is energy-intensive, a major factor in the cost of silicon cells. Perovskite and other thin-film technologies potentially have the advantage of it being easier to handle liquids than thin solid silicon wafers; just deposit the final result of the process on glass.

A downside of these cells is buried at the bottom of another article: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/tech/photovoltaic-material... especially vulnerable to water damage if the seal fails.
[blue][red], you want to make sure you round their shared edge either to the left or to the right. Otherwise, there will be a gap between them. You need to make sure you round their shared edge the same way consistently too, or it will jump back and forth as you resize a window and produce a noticeable jitter.

In this case I would probably do something like:

red.left = blue.right;

(Or vice-versa, depending on which edge you are positioning against).
Creating Ruby server in 7 Lines of code
The weird restructuring, Windows 8 sales, share price, tablet and mobile sales and his leaving suggest otherwise. There aren't any comparisons like those with Cook.
There is another group of people, those who will try to pay for goods, and after failing to find a reasonable way to do that, acquire them through shadier channels.
Assuming the set is homogeneous! Which in this case, is not. A sample extracted from a more or less financially stable region of the country will have drastically different output than a sample extracted from a poorer area. Your assumption about 'the soup well mixed' is less probable to be true, given the lack of any evidence supporting the claim that this study is either meaningful or properly executed.
This is the author of the post. would love to take any questions.
Erm ,what about the videos where people have been beheaded? I have not and will not ever watch one, but its not some tidy guillotine. What about Lee Rigby, the soldier in England who was run over, then hacked to death in a London street? The murderers who did that certainly would have no problem with killing people in cruel ways, especially if they were given state sanction.

For other morbid Medieval executions, read about being broken on the wheel. It's hideous.
Running Android apps on webOS
As someone that likes to pretty much always override author's styles, Chrome is pretty much out for me. There is no easy way in the browser settings to select your own stylesheet. Also there is no easy way to just turn off the author's stylesheet. Doing so can be quite useful for troublesome sites. In Firefox it's View -> Page Style -> None. But even that's obtuse. Not being able to easily flip between stylesheets in the browsers - has meant that author's can't really be bothered to supply them. Having some free well rounded Core styles, that users can apply to any site would be a nice to have feature in the browser, or alternatively making it very simple to add your own.

Opera is the only browser that felt like it let me apply my own stylesheet. Other browers behave inconsistantyl when adding my own. Even Firefox is odd. My compromise is just to specify foreground and background colours, with a larger font size, and an easy to read font. That way the layouts don't get that borked. Reading a well designed page with logical flow off can read quite well, if you apply your own styles, or use your desktops.
1/2 of my full time employment opportunities came from other w00w00 members. I was also a member of ADM.

I was 17 and managing servers during the first dotcom boom when you needed more than just smarts to create a startup. You needed a boatload of VC money.

If w00w00 was formed in present day, half of us would have been funded by YC. We were just smart and young people at the start of this internet thing. Not surprising we went on to make internet companies.

This article does leave out a lot of people and includes someone that shouldn't be included.
Actually, my plan was to have the recognition area expand beyond the visual size of the input box as soon as your pen touched the input box, so as not to penalize the user for wandering out of the box a bit, while not having any visually jarring effect, but it's worth experimenting.

And of course, there is still the option of scaling the page overall. It's possible the audiences that would want bigger input boxes would also want the text and images to be bigger as well, but it needs research to confirm.
Cheers to that, that was a delightful way to pass 20 minutes. I'm in for $25--feels good to support a project like this, even in a small way.
The entire comment section of the Female Founders Conference post is cringey.
Literally every single comment[0] on the first page of the Female Founders Conference post[1] is debate about people being offended by the idea of a tech conference for women. Will the hacker culture as a whole ever grow up?

[0] Besides pg's own comment giving the time of the event and it's two replies.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7326418
frictionless? My touch ID is crap - try doing physical work (building, digging, that sort of stuff) and it will never go. Or a hint of dampness. My thumb print must be subtly different day to day or something, because I only do building stuff at weekends, yet no matter how often I re set the touch ID, even having all 5 prints set to my thumb, I end up entering password most times.
Chances are they invented those features, anyway.
What I learned from an unfortunate incident with the NYPD
The entire articles boils down to "I've been using MS tools, but now I use 'free' tools, and rediscovered command line". There isn't any plot, or a point, or a revelation, or a comparison between stacks in this missive. Nothing at all.
A good IDE with an advanced toolchain is not hip, nope I give you that. But it just works.
Google Hangouts on iOS (2.0)
Do you think rounding to the nearest int in the setters would fix this issue?

I imagine it would cause the occasional 1px drift but would probably be fine for most use cases.
It's a barrage of pretty classic "non-denial denials": deny having done things you weren't doing, but which sound enough like the things you were doing, and presumably people will be mollified — or so the theory goes.
All I am saying is that, in English, to avoid confusing people about your meaning, you're much better off saying "sincere belief".

> My phrasing matches standard English usage.

So does saying "literally" when you mean figuratively -- all the dictionaries now list this perversion, but it's still inadvisable and still sows confusion among educated readers.

It's one thing to argue that a usage is accepted by lexicographers, but quite another to try to engage in effective communications.
As I mentioned to the other poster, off duty officers here (and many/most places) work in their department issued uniform with their badge/radio/gun with full police powers/immunity. Besides neighborhood patrols, another common use is parking garages or high end shopping centers hiring officers to stop traffic to let people in/out of their location on busy streets. It's not just ATL, NYPD paid detail unit supplies off duty in unform officers with dept insurance. Many police department websites even have online forms to fill out if you want to hire officer/s with standard rates.

I believe there are a few states/jurisdictions that restrict off duty officers from working in uniform w/police power, but that's probably a minority. With budgets being cut everywhere, officers being able to earn an extra 50% or more of their normal salary working off duty gigs is a "free benefit" the department can offer, or like in NYC where the NYPD charges a 10% admin fee ($1.18m earned in 2011) it's extra income for the dept.

For example, if Facebook was located in San Jose, they could just pay $46.50/hr for as many officers as they wanted, in unform, per http://www.sjpd.org/PDF_Forms/SEU_Secondary_Employment_Emplo... .
If all of your layouts are created in code, every visual tweak requires an engineer. In general I will do almost anything to NOT have to lay out views by hand, as nothing slows a project down more than jumping into the tweak-a-magic-number-and-recompile cycle. It sucked when I was doing CSS, and it sucks even more when I'm compiling code.

For the most part IB mostly doesn't make sense for games, so I have a custom Photoshop script that exports each layer with metadata. A custom importer reads the metadata file and loads the whole view in the proper positioning. So I've basically swapped IB for Photoshop, but the work flow is essentially the same....
This is a really good point. I struggled with this when I was doing some CoreGraphics, I just couldn't get a line to not "blur" when it should have been crisp. The problem was exactly what you're pointing out.

FWIW, I side on the NIB/Storyboard if your UI is even remotely complicated (sort of the opposite of what the article is saying). Having to nudge a ton of controls around in code is a huge PITA and time saved using NIBs and Storyboards (properly).
Agreed that there are plenty of ideas that warrant prototyping, but I think there is special value in not having a text cursor to manage at all, similar to how touchscreens obviated mouse cursors for certain tasks.
If you don't dance no one likes you