News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

gameofdrones

Re:How I Built a Custom Camper Van (2015) on Monday August 29, 2016 @09:15PM (#12386700)
As it happens I also live in a van (a VW T25 camper) because it's economically-efficient and convenient, and I don't have any urge to buy a million dollar house with a bunch of shiny crap to keep up with the Jones' (my grandparents devoted their lives to this empty pursuit in Los Gatos ahead of learning about the world, themselves or other people). But because marketeers have convinced enough people [0] that homelessness and poverty are such "fatal" pejoratives in the petty, judgmental, status-climbing West, people with alternative lifestyles learn to whom they can share this information... It's nice to be able to go to the beach, or up the coast or inland whenever one wants and cut down to the real, minimal necessities. Plus, it's not much that much of a stretch to go to Burning Man.

[0] just as many Americans have been radicalized by the perverted mind of Roger Ailes' Faux News.

Re:How I Built a Custom Camper Van (2015) on Monday August 29, 2016 @09:04PM (#12386655)
While the website is down, these are also neat:

Hank bought a bus: http://hankboughtabus.com/

Castle truck: http://www.doityourselfrv.com/house-truck-castle/

Re:Principles for Programming Languages for Learners on Sunday August 28, 2016 @11:35PM (#12379851)
Ahh, fondly remembering LOGO for the Apple II in grammar school when I was about 6.
This one instance might be so (unions are imperfect human endeavors), but this article comes across as thinly-veiled MSM/establishment strawman/false equivocation via the pernicious, irrational, data-free worldview which completely ignores the net positive force unions had in the bloody struggle for worker pay and working conditions in the 19th and 20th centuries.

See also: "Inequality for All" and "Where to Invade Next?"

There are way more than three, literally dozens and thousands more DIY.
Re:Decommissioning Otto on Saturday August 20, 2016 @03:48AM (#12325643)
What other deveops tools have you used/want to use?
Re:Decommissioning Otto on Saturday August 20, 2016 @03:47AM (#12325640)
Abstractions-on-top-of-abstractions which promise to reduce complexity by adding more levels of indirection, when the UX of the underlying tools need to be better.

(Having wrote a multihypervisor disk-cloner in Ruby.)

Re:Very High Performance C Extensions for JRuby+Truffle on Tuesday July 19, 2016 @09:55PM (#12126340)
According to the JRuby dev repo[0] the truffle branch[1] was merged into master and blog[2], Truffle may be bringing cexts back and higher performance to JRuby. If this could be ship production-worthy as default, it would be awesomesauce!

0. https://github.com/jruby/jruby

1. truffle-head possibly took its place as most dev seems to be on master

2. http://blog.jruby.org/2014/01/truffle_graal_high_performance...

Re:Coup attempt underway in Turkey on Friday July 15, 2016 @09:23PM (#12104792)
French culture has some inconsistent, fascist, illiberalisms, especially in the differences of making fun of Christianity vs. making fun of Judaism, or similarly with Christianity vs. Islam. (govt demanding firing of Sine). Actual progressive liberalism should at least include listening to other viewpoints, being open to new ideas and generally being sensible and constructive. But narrow, identity-politics labels aren't all that useful in reality and end up inventing wedge-issues and false dichotomies. (There are some people looking for common ground while others are looking for Sayre's law fights.)

Je suis Charlie

Re:Coursera courses preserved by Archive Team on Sunday July 10, 2016 @09:32AM (#12065502)
Welcome to encouraging bitrot.
Re:Coursera courses preserved by Archive Team on Sunday July 10, 2016 @09:29AM (#12065495)
Yup, totally worthless, token effort.
- IceFloor (since OS X includes pf)

- mDNSResponder -NoMulticastAdvertisements

- Hands Off!/LS

- Vera/TrueCrypt

- Samhain/TripWire

- GPG Tools

- Homebrew packages

- a password manager

- 5x DNSCrypt-proxy instances round-robin'ed with dnsmasq

- Chrome/FF

- TorBrowser

- i2p

- no unnecessary apps

- follow the NSA and other guides for securing OS X (FileVault 2, firmware password, don't use iCloud Keychain, etc.)

- use DBAN on old systems and drives

Be aware that security has to be balanced and leave a usable device, and some security measures interfere with and/or disable certain features.

And no flash/adobe, browser java plugin

References:

https://github.com/drduh/OS-X-Security-and-Privacy-Guide

http://docs.hardentheworld.org/OS/OSX_10.11_El_Capitan/

http://www.tenable.com/blog/hardening-os-x-using-the-nsa-gui...

https://ist.mit.edu/macosx/1011

https://walterkilar.wordpress.com/2016/05/08/apple-os-x-el-c...

Re:“Should you encrypt or compress first?” on Tuesday June 28, 2016 @05:21PM (#11997683)
That is still your problem and you need to take responsibility for it. It is wiser to learn and know what you're talking about, don't just add ambient, useless, incorrect noise.
Re:Ask HN: Examples of reliable software you enjoy using on Tuesday June 28, 2016 @04:52PM (#11997473)
OS X Notes are good enough for me and better than Evernote. Evernote insecurity and quirks were just one straw too many.
Re:Ask HN: Examples of reliable software you enjoy using on Tuesday June 28, 2016 @04:50PM (#11997454)
For those Window people, Omnigraffle is basically why there is no Visio for Mac.
Re:Ask HN: Examples of reliable software you enjoy using on Tuesday June 28, 2016 @04:48PM (#11997441)
Dev: Ruby (chruby/ruby-install), node, postgres, redis, elasticsearch, Dash, MacVim

Console: zsh, iTerm, tmux

Mac apps: Bartender, Hands Off!, Breakaway (a 10.10+ fork), coconutbattery, iStat Menus, flux, Forecast Bar, TotalFinder, Daisy Disk, VLC (+ trakt-for-vlc)

Re:“Should you encrypt or compress first?” on Tuesday June 28, 2016 @04:28PM (#11997274)
Compress, encrypt and then MAC. If MAC fails, don't decrypt. If decryption fails, don't (and can't) decompress. If decompression fails, throw away data, because compression-to-encryption time corruption occurred.
Re:“Should you encrypt or compress first?” on Tuesday June 28, 2016 @04:26PM (#11997258)
Re:California Hits the Brakes on High-Speed Rail on Tuesday June 28, 2016 @04:13PM (#11997143)
It's ludicrous that it can't be something like Hyperloop, not for hundreds of billions and not take 50 years.

PS: I'm from Silicon Valley, and I've heard about the mythology high-speed rail for over 25 years during the construction of the marginal-utility Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority light rail, which is demonstrably worse and far more inflation-adjusted expensive per mile than the municipal trains of the turn of the century that were ripped up previously.

Tangentially interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

In the US, corporate and wealth welfare combined are on the order of several trillion USD including subsidies, tax breaks and other incentives. Welfare proper is on the order of 700 billion. Or: all the rich people take around a dozen times more than all the poor people.
Re:Stalking the Wild Groundnut on Sunday June 19, 2016 @03:30AM (#11932156)
Neat. Speaking of stubborn, usually desirable plants: mint. Plant it separately in a container.
Re:San Antonio man has engine that gets 100 mpg on Wednesday June 15, 2016 @11:00PM (#11913632)
The most efficient fossil fuel-based engines are massive two-stroke diesels found on extremely large ships and in some peaker power gensets which currently have efficiencies just over 51% and BSFC's over 275.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake_specific_fuel_consumptio...

In this case, he may have matched the performance of very large engines, which have the advantages of optimizing for scale, but time will tell whether this solution can deliver.

thunderf00t will debunk this as not a sanitary napkin-making machine-scale revolution.
Re:Tor Project Statement on Jacob Appelbaum on Sunday June 05, 2016 @02:15AM (#11839873)
If someone happens to be a high-profile security researcher, they can safely assume their behavior is under an Argus smartphone camera HPC cluster of microscopes and therefore should take extraordinary care to avoid any appearance of impropriety, even where none exists (just like when working at an elite university or MBB consulting shop). With Twitter and YouTube in every pocket, everyone is a potential journalist. If there happen to be a few feminist crazy people actively trying to destroy and entrap folks, then extra care with public interactions, coworkers and others is a best practice, and being guarded about whom is let into private parties as well.

Finally, it may or may not be applicable to this scenario, but a common failure pattern occurs when people sell themselves on the delusion of boundary-less, untouchable privilege and then end up in hubris and legal trouble (i.e., Jimmy Savile, Bill Cosby, etc.)