skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I honestly have no idea what you are talking about. The whole point of standard i/o streams is for them to be portable and composable by other programs without those programs having to be designed to work with yours.

His point is that two streams are not enough, you don't want to present the same output stream or a human, a logfile or an other utility.

> And what 'formatting markup'? There is no 'markup' on a terminal, unless you're dealing with colors or something

Right, so there is markup on a terminal.

> which you would disable if your fd wasn't a tty.

Which would be much simpler to handle if there was a stream for human consumption and one for piping

> And why would you send 'headers' to a completely different file descriptor anyway?

Because headers are useful to human users or when capturing output in a file to read later rather than in an other utility?
How Microsoft's expected fitness band fits into its new wearables game plan
A ‘Dark Winter’ of Ebola Terrorism?
Yubikey Neo should provide FIDO U2F over NFC.
It does, and saltwater isn't conductive enough. The effect degrades the lower the electrical conductivity of the medium in which eddy currents are formed. Pretty much requires something like copper or silver (or gold!) for high enough conductivity to make it work. A superconducting surface works great for this.
> It's just designers trying to justify their own salary.

Seems a little unfair.
California Lemon Lawyers (contacts)
This submission was vote-manipulated: https://twitter.com/Sign2Pay/status/524531115428950016
Programs that want access to the actual console. E.g. for interactive input, moving the cursor around, etc.
did you not get the main point? if for some reason you feel you must avoid systemd, even though it provides enormous benefits (especially for servers), you can.
Google leads $542M funding in augmented reality firm Magic Leap
The response to Ebola vs. the other things isn't that different. I see no reason to believe the CDC is caught flatfooted by "Ebola", which is indeed as you say a relatively minor issue that one could almost consider a practice warmup for the "real thing", but will suddenly be a well-oiled machine when the real crisis hits. That is not how human organizations work.

If the CDC is suddenly able to handle Spanish-Influenza-Bird-Flu-2015 with stunning competence, it will only be because we got lucky and got a wakeup call with our complete unpreparedness for and blithering incompetence with Ebola.

Unless, of course, enough people keep covering for the CDC because by golly, they're government so of course they're competent, ignore your lying eyes, in which case we will learn nothing and have the same CDC when the real crisis hits. And next time, it probably won't be Ebola. (Unless someone somewhere gets the bright idea of just how much havoc they could wreak with a simple trip through New York via Liberia... which will be vicious anti-government smearing right-wingnut fear mongering right up until the moment it happens....)
[Review Of] Kevin Kelly “What Technology Wants”
Outgoing GCHQ boss defends agency activities after Snowden revelations
Show HN: Embed stunning polls in seconds with Voice Polls
I don't necessarily agree with this. I think the reason why flat UI is having a moment is the same reason minimalism in general works. You get to remove anything things that are superfluous and focus on data/information. As awesome as spinning 3D globes and background rivets are, I prefer flat design when it comes to getting information.

I think it's best to try to get rid of unnecessary garbage in your UI, maybe that's the skeuomorphism, or maybe it's the amount buttons, images, content, etc. If done well, flat design is a usability win.
I get interested in the response to these sorts of problems. Both in the comments here and over at Tao's post, there are a lot of examples of brute force solutions. This seems like a common response to recreational mathematical problems, and it has always seemed to me like it's missing the point. These questions aren't generally posed because people care about the answer, but because there are interesting or surprising ideas involved in working it out. In this problem, I guess the surprising thing would be that you are actually given sufficient information to find the answer. The simplest brute force approaches can tell you this, but don't tell you anything about why that may be. I'm reminded of Hamming's motto: "the purpose of computing is insight, not numbers."
Build a Real-Time Twitter Stream with Node and React.js
I've got an iPad, and I love it, but it's not a "real computer." It's a dumb terminal. Case in point-- you cannot develop software for the iPad on the iPad (even with a keyboard).

I've had the thesis for a long time that mobile isn't going to displace "desktop." It's going to join it. It's not a replacement for the PC but a new kind of thing-- the "third device."
agree - those lenovo laptops feel poorly in graphics. heard that Acer or HP do better nowadays, but have not checked.
It looks like Tsū read the previous thread[1], and plan to let the users give their share of the ad-generated revenue to charity.

As explained in the first thread, you need an invitation to signup. You can use mine: http://www.tsu.co/xavier.

--

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8457622
> In this case, the second MTM (intercepting communications) will not work, because the user will be unable to log in (as you initialized their account and therefor had to set a password).

OK, once again: both SMS and internet are MTMed. Now why can't the machine doing the internet MTM use the user's password? Why do you think it has to do that before the user inputs it?
Well... In fact it's alredy happening with the init wars
A Sound Software OEM Strategy – 4 Considerations – Waltika
It uses HID. The specs are here: https://fidoalliance.org/specifications/download
> At the upper end of secure machines, USB ports will be physically disabled. And if you're not hyper security conscious, you're not going to bother with a physical key.

The reason that "upper end of secure machines" have disabled USB ports is because they are organization-owned machines that are issued to untrusted employees (often in organizations where all employees are untrusted in the relevant sense). But in the case of first-party machines (e.g., personally owned machines) where the user is similarly security-conscious, that factor doesn't exist. So, really, all you need to be is a security-conscious individual that uses your own computer for things where you have security concerns. (Or, as an organization, be one where the threat profile you concerned about addressing is more external than internal.)
I am not sure that one can learn to have that kind of openness without practicing it oneself. An equally esoteric practice that might help to foster this is the Bohm Dialogue.[1]

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohm_Dialogue
John Maeda on PopTech and VC Life: “Conferences Are the New College”
Along those lines, you might want to check out the card game 'Eleusis', which was written about by Martin Gardner: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleusis_(card_game)
Why don't you do a little math for all of us instead of providing smart remarks?

What percentage of Samsung's yearly revenue is smartphones? Is that a large part or a small part of their revenue?

What would a 90% drop in Samsung's smartphone revenue do to their overall revenue? Would that be 90% of Samsung's overall revenue or some smaller number? What's that number?

Is that a large part or a small part of their revenue?
What's the difference between the DOS and Win95 versions? I only played it on Mac, but the DOS version seems basically like what I remember.
Using this while developing my website. It works pretty well, although seems to have issues on various browsers (like Safari) where there is no scrolling.

The main issue I had was that smooth scrolling libraries (for jumping to various places on the same page) didn't work until I referenced the element to scroll as a specific div (that contained all of my parallax) instead of "body" or "html, body" like suggested online.

Overall, I like the flexibility and the ability to inspect the layers using simple translations and rotations.
Why would potatoes be anymore expensive than other staple crops?
Was a noble "Tom Clancy-esque" plot line but not a very productive op-ed
You could disable USB but maybe still have NFC readers on your machines at higher levels of security?
I strongly disagree. I've been homebrewing all-grain batches for about six years. My typical brewday takes about nine hours and involves four distinct vessels. There's a lot of heavy lifting and a lot of cleaning.

This machine would make better beer, more consistently, and with a lot less effort.
There's no JavaScript on that page outside of Google Analytics. You're right though, it feels pretty terrible without the native scrolling momentum.
I just use a Rakefile to do similar. I just clone my Git repo and run 'rake' in the directory and I'm done. (Same for many other apps.)

https://github.com/Slackwise/dotfiles/blob/master/vim
The associated article gives a good description of how this effect is achieved:

http://keithclark.co.uk/articles/pure-css-parallax-websites/

I find it interesting that parallax was initially a way to fake 3d-like effects, and now we're using 3d effects to implement parallax!
Not much of an improvement over 2FA using my phone because the times when I really need it to be easy is when I'm browsing on my phone. Since this is USB I can't use it on my phone. When I'm on my laptop I just pull out my phone and type in a short code and be done with it.
There's a neat discussion on Oculus Rift forums about this company and speculation that it may be based on light field displays.

https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=1...
Worked really well for me on Android. Native easing worked as I would expect.
How to ace your technical interview
I am a big fan of Fastmail. You pay for it ($40 / yr), but IMHO it's worth it. Not sure what sort of deals they have for businesses.
Google's ex-CEO on building a strong company
Show HN: GreatDJ – Create and save playlists that sync across devices
That's not what this is intended to protect against. If your local machine is compromised, you are screwed, and 2FA no matter what the form isn't going to help you. At a minimum, for that, you need out-of-band confirmation of critical actions (e.g., a message to a different pre-registered device to confirm financial transactions before they are executed.)
Hi everyone,
Wanted to show you a small side project I've been working on - GreatDJ, where you can create and save Youtube playlists and optionally have them sync across clients/devices.
They main use case was to allow everyone at a party to push songs into a common playlist (say, a computer that's connected to the main speakers).

Lately I've been working on making that easier: if you have a computer on 'party mode' and use a phone on the same network to access the site, you'll be automagically redirected to the same playlist so you can start pushing songs straight away!

The whole thing is also open source: https://github.com/ruiramos/greatdj

Have fun, feedback would be amazing, thanks!
I despise it when commands do this - mysql -e results are formatted differently depending on whether the output is directed to the terminal or to a file.
Reading the color names, I thought Nephritis (#27ae60) sounded like something else…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephritis
So the mobile version of this would be /less/ secure than standard 2FA?
A very inspiring woman
As another article I read just today pointed out (in a completely different context), the point of Unix isn't the number or size of the tools. It's the composability of the tools.

systemd might be a collection of many small tools, but they don't compose well. Dbus isn't a substitute for piping little blobs of text between stdin and stdout of a bunch of different programs that are utterly agnostic of each other's existence.

And systemd might well be great. Aesthetically, I don't care much for it, but I'm using it with no problems, so I guess it's fine. But it's not "the Unix philosophy".
If he admits that, then he'll have to spend time learning new tools. Can't have that...
Systemd is great. I've used sockets for ssh, I use the timers instead of cron, everything goes smoothly and works really well.

I don't get the hate, I love it.
I would have thought that the point of the post is "how effing ridiculous is it that we're giving kids severely broken problems?!"

I'm all for giving kids more open-ended problems so that they get a chance to think and explore, but this one is ridiculous. They each sell one chicken for $35 in the morning and give the rest away in the afternoon is a valid solution and yet utterly, utterly wrong since the odds of something like that happening in real life are basically nil.

If you're going to give kids an under-constrained problem like this at least make the solution a line rather than a surface so that way you're only screwing with their heads some instead of a lot.
Which Phablet do you use?
Shame I have to pick EITHER 2-step or Security Key.

My ideal would be to use Security Key to bypass 2-step on devices that supported it and then use 2-step elsewhere.

For example, some public computers have the USB port literally glued shut, therefore Security Key won't work. In those cases I'll still have my phone with me and could bypass it via 2-step.

Essentially I want to use the Security Key as a way to save me typing in my 2-step code because I'm lazy, rather than to "add" security.

Google's current 2-step "remember-device" doesn't really work for me as it utilises cookies which get cleared. I could add it to a white-list of preserved cookies but they use obscure often changing sub-domains.
Try adding -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch; to enable elastic/momentum scrolling on the .parallax div.

EDIT: Nevermind, just tried it in the simulator and it seems to break everything. Although it is smooth... :)
Ask HN: Best Weather API's?
I am looking for a decent weather API, preferably free/not too expensive that doesn't require attribution. Any recommendations?

Ps. I will probably need to do quite a lot of API requests in the near future when my app launches.
The loneliest plant in the world (2011)
Thanks, appreciate it! A new one on a daily basis from now on.
Show HN: Qoffee – improve your meeting efficiency [Rails Rumble Project]
FIDO U2F strives to support Bluetooth and NFC, see https://fidoalliance.org/specs/fido-u2f-overview-v1.0-rd-201...
Sweet Alert for Bootstrap – Blends nicely with any Bootstrap based project
Interesting. I've hacked something together for my personal usage with my OpenGPG smartcard for use on my Windows desktop and developer-mode chromebook. In the end I had to work with "chrome native messaging" which basically calls native binaries on the host OS and is a nightmare to set up.

This doesn't look like they're planning to start supporting existing smartcards, but hopefully it's a first step?

My idea was to create a login page that requires the user to sign a secret with their private key which can be completed manually, but also automatically with the click of a button if the extension is installed. The key could live securely on a smartcard or in the user's gpg keyring, it doesn't matter as that part is deferred to gpg.

In case anyone happens to be interested, my un-documented prototype sits at https://github.com/r04r/GPGThing. It consists of a chrome extension, a golang application do some juggling between json input/output (which is a limitation by chrome native message passing) and gpg, and apache configs to set it up as an authentication method.

There's some more hacks necessary to get it working on chromebook, including a crouton installation with gpg.
A CleanKeys keyboard does the same thing but cheaper.
There have been some real hate-filled messages on the mailing lists. If they had been directed at a women then they would have made HN all on their own. The article links to one of them, if you want to check it out.
Cogs in the System
Spending a lot of time learning non-portable technologies isn't a decision to be taken lightly.
Despite my extreme (32 year long) computer use, I only had RSI symptoms when using a mouse and under stress. Since I use my macbook trackpad and have no stress, I can sit in any position for any time and do anything and have 0 symptoms. I am very interested in coding without keyboards etc because these days I happen to think a lot more about my code before trying it and that means I walk around a lot; sitting down or walking to my standing desk both seem cumbersome.
No, it's not. It's using HID, but not by identifying itself as a keyboard.
Yeah, they need to polarize the Lorentz force, then they're good to go.
"Single-page application;" i.e., a Web app that exists entirely within a single Web page and therefore is heavily reliant on JS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-page_application
Here's an entirely different approach:

Take an old LCD screen (small). Take the back out of it. Put a (grayscale) single-pixel sensor in behind it.

Then repeatedly display random hash on the screen and take a measurement of the light intensity. My intuitive guess would be that you'd get the most info with half the pixels on fully and half of them off fully, randomly chosen, but I can't say why.

You should be able to get much the same result as this, without any moving parts. Although you'd have to use an entirely different transformation to get there - it'd reduce to a (massively) underspecified system of linear equations to solve, with noise added in to boot. Have fun with that.
That it's going to be an uphill battle is an understatement.

Someone replied on LWN, when he posted his proposal, that he had implemented a sort of home-grown database using non-UTF8 characters for the file names.

Rube Goldberg, indeed!
I've heard good things about forecast.io (and the actual website is great). I know that there are some legitimate news websites that use it.

https://developer.forecast.io/
As a designer who also writes code, this attitude really frustrates me. There are a lot of reasons that flat UI makes more sense for software, especially for responsive web.

Flat UI means less code and easier maintainability. It holds up better across a wide range of sizes. It makes it easier to have a style guide in code and create reusable modules.
This allows the design team to focus on the bigger-picture user experience instead of perfecting button gradients.

High information density is great in many applications, especially interfaces supporting complex tasks for expert users. However, it takes a lot of work to design a great high-density interface. I feel like most of the high density interfaces I see are more of a case of the design or product teams not being able to make hard decisions about what's really important.

While some flat UIs certainly go too far in the other direction, I firmly believe that minimalism encourages good design by forcing a conversation about what information to prioritize. Especially for the mainstream consumer web, this is almost always better for everyone.

Finally, I don't appreciate this kind of attack on my profession. Good design is far closer to engineering than to taste. I don't think I'm hoodwinking people into hiring me.
If only people realised that design is more than a theme.
Yes, I know. I had one of those. It uses a "special" 65W TDP desktop class CPU. The cooling solution is pretty crappy and noisy as hell.
Anyone else notice the FIDO alliance board is kind of lacking when it comes to open source and/or privacy people on it?

Though it has RSA, Google, Visa and no doubt many others who are happy to sell or give your stuff to the NSA and GCHQ...
Both the demo and the blog post stutter badly while scrolling on this 2.5GHz i5 iMac running Safari 7.0.5.
Helpcreature – Dropping waves
Thanks. So that's what other already said, there is nothing more. This was a really minor issue, I don't see why it would make anyone that much happy, but it's sure nice to have it fixed.
The Hoverboard Is Finally Real
you have pretty clearly formed (and expressed) your opinion already.
The ethics of the Guardian's Whisper bombshell
This is incorrect. Security Key is not just a one-way OTP generator. It is a bidirectional challenge response system. This requires explicit browser support to work.
For me, the main story is that there is still money thanks to people like Google and AH to go after the big bold crazy technology dream. Kudos to all Rony, Google and AH for the courage and vision.
Well, if it's part of your job I'd say it's not a decision at all...
Not sure how it will interact with this, but at least one of the compatible Yubikey devices that was mentioned also supports NFC specifically for use on mobile devices that lack USB ports.
> Shame I have to pick EITHER 2-step or Security Key.

You don't. You must use 2-step to use Security Key.

> My ideal would be to use Security Key to bypass 2-step on devices that supported it and then use 2-step elsewhere.

That's exactly what happens when you use Security Key. FTFA:
If you use 2-Step Verification, you can choose Security Key as your primary method [...] In general, you’ll still be able to use a verification code the way you normally do on any device that doesn’t support Security Key.
Right, but how does the challenge get to the device?

"Security Key is a physical USB second factor that only works after verifying the login site is truly a Google website, not a fake site pretending to be Google."

The specs say that a challenge is involved. The device must receive the challenge. "Typing out" keys isn't sufficient unless that typing can go the other way. And in the OS, there has to be support for Chrome to send data to such a device. Normal keyboard input is not sufficient for this. This is what I'm looking for clarity on.
So, we recently had a bunch of articles coming out on "the fundamental insecurity of USB" [1]. How does that jive with a USB-based security key? Can't this be "flashed" like any other USB device?

[1]: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/07/the_fundament...
wasn't aware that asking people to support us actually counts as manipulating. people are still free to choose to upvote or not.
He preached about forth and was paid $90 to stop?
Get started with Calabash for automated iOS app testing
Given the description, it sounds like this problem was given to a club of kids who do recreational/contest problems, which makes a pretty big difference. I think they probably get the spirit in which it is offered and understand the implicit constraints (e.g. no giving away chickens).
Featured on Betalist. Amazing feeling
The Yubikey website specifies that the device registers as a Keyboard, flash card, and flash reader when you plug it in. That said it isn't entirely clear if this new standard utilizes that or if that's merely provided as a fallback for older devices that don't support this new protocol.

Edit: After consulting the specification for this standard it does appear as if it uses the core USB specification to communicate with supported devices when using this protocol. There is also information stating that NFC, bluetooth and other transports will have specification provides later on but that they currently only have a spec for communication over USB. The takeaway appears to be that the Yubikey device can function as a 2FA over NFC or USB when in a sort of fallback mode that emulates a keyboard, but when used directly with this protocol can only support USB. It's possible there might be some driver shims that allow it to communicate over NFC while still appearing as a USB device to the browser, but that would of course require a custom driver be installed and most likely violates this standard in its current formulation.
I forgot to mention, there is a special discount for HN users: https://gum.co/archeeve/hackernews (-50%)

Currently the app is available for OSX, however in the next month it will be availble on Windows too. The app is created with node-webkit. Let me know if you would like to discuss about a technology I use in the project.