Ask HN: Linux distribution with security support for Raspberry Pi? - <AUTHOR> It seems Debian security updates don't get ported over to Raspbian in a timely fashion. What options are there? <comment><USER2> I have not looked deep into this, but you might try Arch Linux ARM [1], which might have newer versions of packages (if it is anything like its x86 variant). It used to be offered on the official Rpi distro page [2] but I think it has since been removed, though I am unsure if that indicates that less effort is going into maintaining it. Regardless, I too would be very interested in scrutinizing these Raspbian security patches to see how quickly they are built and distributed compared with their release date, and if an alternative build of Raspbian that focuses on this was to be released, I would be very interested.

[1] [https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv6/raspberry- pi](https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv6/raspberry-pi)

[2] [https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/](https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/)

<comment><USER3> +1 for Arch Linux ARM. Even if packages aren't available for something, you should be able to easily build it using makepkg.

I would not recommend running Arch (x86_64 or ARM) if you are a new Linux user, though. Batteries not included, some assembly required.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Void Linux, Arch Linux Arm. There is no Void image for RPi3 but the RPi2 image works fine, even the WiFi.

</comment><comment><USER5> This really isn't meant to come across as flippant but if you're running something serious or important enough on your Rpi that makes you that concerned about security, maybe you shouldn't be running it on an Rpi.

<comment><USER6> Often, you care about security not because of the app running on the rpi, but the environmental risk: Having your home network become a malware distribution node and/or your backups on a connected NAS server compromised, say.

(Actually the replaceable/disposable nature of the rpi often makes it a more robust platform than the alternatives as long as you can tolerate short outages)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What I use: [https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:ARM](https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:ARM) / [https://www.suse.com/products/arm/](https://www.suse.com/products/arm/)

What exactly do you need? SELinux, AppArmor, generic base package security updates?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just a Linux distribution that gets security updates to the userland and kernel. Raspbian's latest security updates are from many months ago, their kernel doesn't ship with a changelog that would show what has been fixed, and and Debian doesn't support the RPi's.

Thanks for the recomendation, Ubuntu and OpenSuse seem most promising so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you have a fleet you might want to check out NixOS and Hydra. There is someone building nix pkgs for ARM/RPi not sure what is the current status... Just keep in mind that the learning curve is steep for NixOS, but the entire thing can be automated.

Broadly speaking if you want security you need to compile and distribute your own packages.

</comment><comment><USER6> Ubuntu 16.04 claims to officially support RPi 2+. See eg [https://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-3169-3/](https://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-3169-3/) for a recent security patch to the RPI kernel package.</comment>


Procedural scattering and scaling based on reference image ( Unity) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sneha-belkhale/procedural-image-based-scattering <comment><AUTHOR> related medium article :: [https://medium.com/@snayss/exploration-into-image- based-proc...](https://medium.com/@snayss/exploration-into-image-based- procedural-generation-unity-8f9fa7de10c1)</comment>


Give a portion of your Amazon purchases to charity at no cost to you - <AUTHOR> https://smile.amazon.com/ <comment><USER2> Can we just choose to give some to Amazon Warehouse employees or delivery drivers?

Since Amazon won't do it themselves and treats them so badly?

<comment><USER3> That will certainly help Amazon maintain its monopoly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The one thing I loathe about this is that I have to remember to go to smile.amazon.com... which I never remember to do. This is presumably why this doesn't impact Amazon's bottom line much.

(And yes, I'm sure if I really wanted to, there's a browser extension to do this for you.)

<comment><USER5> Yep, there is more than one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why was this posted? AmazonSmile has been around for years and I am not aware of any changes related to it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I figured a lot of people (most?) don't know about it and it's a net good for the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Giving without cost. Isnt this what Anand Giridharadas was talking about?

</comment><comment><USER8> This is so awesome. St. Jude is my team.

</comment><comment><USER9> Give to a charity while contributing less tax. It's a zero-sum game.

<comment><USER10> The tax discount is not 1-1 with your contributions to charity.</comment></comment>


A nice 64-bit error in C - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@CPP_Coder/a-nice-64-bit-error-in-c-203afc121bbc

<comment><USER2> And that's exactly why you shouldn't ignore compiler warnings...</comment>


Valve Reveals First Gen Steam Machines - <AUTHOR> http://store.steampowered.com/news/12175/

<comment><USER2> After dealing with Steam support I have lost any enthusiasm for Valve and Steam.

I recently purchased a game from them that has been out for over a year, they ran out of CD Keys so Steam gave me the "could not connect to key server" message. After going back and forth with Steam support they refused to issue me a refund or even give me an ETA for when I would be able to play the game that I've already payed for. Horrible customer support and I doubt I'm the first customer they've done this to.

Several weeks later, no game, no refund, no cd key, and no update from their support staff (which is accessible via email only, no chat, no phone). Screw you Valve and Steam, I'll stick to my PC.

<comment><USER3> Terrible support from a company that uses Digital Rights Management? Think I've heard this story before....

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Okay, what I don't get, how could Valve get that many partners to offer Steam Machines? Seeing as how little games for Linux there currently are? Did Valve tell them something we don't know? Like, every major Engine Developer is about to offer an OpenGL option that would allow devs to continue to work just as they do now but the resulting binary could be created with OpenGL instead of DX?

I know that you can stream your Windows games through the Steam Box but come on. If I wanted to do that, I could already run an hdmi cable from my PC directly to my TV and don't need an extra box in between.

<comment><USER5> Basically these are just PC manufacturers and the Steam Machines are just PCs. So for them its more or less business as usual, and many of them (like Alienware) already had quite similar systems on sale. With the possibility of the Steam Machine brand resulting in more sales for products they would be selling in a similar form anyway, it was an easy sell i guess.

It could potentially be a huge business to sell the best steam machines on the market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice to see that they gathered some of the "big" names I fondly remember from my gaming days (Alienware, Alternate, GigaByte, Zotac). It looks like they're not targeting the console demographic, but the classical "PC gamers".

It has been getting harder and harder to get a good gaming PC. One reason is that since I'm grown up I can no longer read gaming magazines all day long to become a hardware expert ;-). The other is that there are less and less good off-the-shelf gaming PCs. Either they are too expensive, or too loud, or they are very unbalanced (GPU too weak, too little RAM when RAM is expensive, far more RAM then neccessary when RAM is cheap, ...).

At the same time, the whole PC market seems to be shrinking (I don't have any numbers, that's just what you read everywhere). Dell and the likes will always have enough enterprise customers, but the consumer-targeted manufacturers are probably in trouble. It makes a lot of sense for the remaining small vendors to join forces under a common label.

It's also great for the customers, since they don't have to go through the trouble of building their own PC (including choosing parts). But they still get the benefits of a custom PC: Well-balanced hardware at a reasonable price, that they know will be able to play the games they want it for. I believe that by creating a new category "steam PC" we'll be seeing a lot of positive competition and transparency in that area.

<comment><USER7> I actually just went and built a new machine...and it wasn't _too_ bad. To put some things in perspective, back in the mid-90s I worked at a computer hardware store, building and repairing machines day-in and day-out, but I haven't been in that kind of business since then. There was almost nothing similar to those days except the basic names of some of the parts "video card", "case" etc. I also build my last machine some 7 years ago and even from then the industry has moved fast enough that almost nothing is recognizable.

Slots are all different, the variety of RAM types is astonishing and there are more form factors, cooling solutions, hard drive types and motherboard types than you can shake a stick at.

Turns out the internet is a _very_ good resource these days for benchmarks, price comparisons, compatibility reports etc. It really only took me 3 or 4 evenings to get back up to speed with the state of the art (ASUS had a great series of videos on NewEgg about their latest motherboard line), put together some rough sketches of systems and started to price them out. A couple iterations later and I settled on a configuration and placed my order.

A few days later everything arrived, and even though I had never touched an SSD before, had everything assembled in 2 very lazy evenings. Instructions are provided these days with most of the parts and aren't too bad. I probably did a couple things not-quite-right, but everything seems to work fine so.

I expect this system to give me 5-7 years of service and it ran well under $2k. Has an SSD for the main drive and 4TB of secondary storage, 32GB of RAM, not "quite" top of the line video (but pretty beastly), 4 cores on the latest intel architecture. It chews up games and emulation with ease and I actually do my day-to-day work inside of a couple of VMs that you barely notice are running.

So yeah, it took a few more days of my time for research, but now I know the hardware scene a lot better and the time from order to fully usable system wasn't terribly longer than ordering a complete box.

For fun, I tried to spec out an Alienware and came up with a system not quite as fast, with less storage for about a $1k more.

<comment><USER3> There's a website that helps you pick and order the parts, you can get advice on builds, or use someone else's build

[http://pcpartpicker.com/](http://pcpartpicker.com/)

Otherwise there are plenty of small companies that supply gaming PCs, as well as Asus (Republic of Gamers) and Dell (through its purchase of Alienware).

<comment><USER7> Man, that would have been super useful this last go around!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I thought the steam machine would be more console-like in its uniformity but it seems to be more a case of "Limited compatible component guaranteed to work with Steam" sets of PCs.

Sounds like a good place to look if you want a normal desktop Linux PC which is almost guaranteed to be compatible.

<comment><USER5> Yep, and Steam Machines should make very good Windows-PCs as well. After all they are well designed, reasonably small, have a proper cooling solution and run standard hardware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can actually see Steam Machines find their place next to PS4/Xbox1 in this generation for several reasons:

\- PS4/Xbox1 are very similar to PC Architecture (Steam Machine)

\- even first gen Steam Machines are more powerful than consoles, a few years down the line they will be orders of magnitude faster

\- Steam Machines are backwards compatible and can be replaced with faster ones when the need arises. With the 4K age dawning, this could be a huge deal as the new consoles often don't even run 1080p natively. Especially if you consider that the last gen lasted almost 8 years.

\- Developing/Publishing is still a lot easier on Steam than it is on the new consoles, big deal for small devs

\- it could actually be a console that PC gamers love

\- Valve has the right mindset and resources to pull this off

As with everything there are also risks of course (non unified design/performance, Games, Linux) but all the contenders have their pros and cons, biggest one of the consoles is their userbase obviously.

<comment><USER9> _\- it could actually be a console that PC gamers love_

As an old-school PC gamer, this is the first "console" I've been interested in since the first Playstation. Don't know how big he marked of people like me is though..

</comment></comment><comment> Al-Khwarizmi Am I the only one to think they are too expensive? The cheapest ones are more expensive than the most expensive competing console...

<comment><USER10> I was watching a gaming podcast the other day and someone made a good point, if valve were to go aggressively after console users with the steambox right now at the start of a new console round they'd be setting themselves up for a world of hurt. Microsoft/Sony could deliberately pay off developers to hold up the PC version of games for 6+ months after console releases. If you can't play the latest and greatest that would significantly drop the value of a steambox.

So instead, release a steambox version which is only going to be popular with "enthusiasts", bug/beta test the hell out of them and then more aggressively market steamboxes in 2-5 years time when the current console generation is starting to look old.

Valve are playing a long game here I think, the value proposition of a steambox isn't going to make sense until we're about half way through the current console cycle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wasn't expecting so many different machines. I was thinking of a cheap steam machine (300/400 $) to play indie games and game about 4 years old, a medium spec'd machine for about 700 $ that can play everything in the market, and a 1500 $ machine with high specs.

Still, one of the great points in PCs is the variety of hardware.

I'm just curious on how Valve (or the HW vendors) are gonna market it. With consoles you have the idea that with that unit you can play everything. With a steam machine is different. I'd like a "with version A you can play X, with version B you can play X+Y, with version C you can play X+Y and have 3D"...

I don't care too much for graphics, so hardware specs don't speak too much for me. Tell me how these specs translate in certain game. I just need enough resolution and enought effects to feel imersed to be happy with the graphics.

<comment><USER6> I think they're not so much building "the steam machines", but they are developing a spec.

> 'm just curious on how Valve (or the HW vendors) are gonna market it. With > consoles you have the idea that with that unit you can play everything. With > a steam machine is different. I'd like a "with version A you can play X, > with version B you can play X+Y, with version C you can play X+Y and have > 3D"...

This is nowadays already not much of a problem. If you build a mid-high end PC now, you can expect it to play every game at least at reasonable settings for the next couple of years. How long it's going to hold is always a bit of speculation, but you can get hardware reccomendations from certain magazines or websites.

The same is true for the games' side. If I buy a new game, gaming magazines/websites will tell you how much CPU, GPU, RAM you need to play it on minimal, medium, and maximal settings (the hardware requirements on the boxes are usually rubbish, unfortunately). They usually also say something like "works fine if you've built your PC in the last 3 years". You don't need to match the specs exactly, because games have gotten pretty good at automatically adjusting settings.

So it works now, but it's only going to get easier with Steam machines. You'll probably see games advertized as "Works great with 2015 steam boxes. Best effects with a 2016 steam box, or AMD Radeon OMG9000. Minimal requirements: 2014 steam box or equivalent (Intel Core i5 xxxx, 8 GB RAM, ...)."

If I were them, I'd either have yearly revisions, or hardware levels. So in 2014, a low-end will be HW level 5, a mid-end will be level 6, and a high-end will be level 7. One year later, a new high-end will maybe be level 9. Games would then just say you need a level 7 PC to run (very much like the windows hardware index, except PC's will be built to reach a certain number).

<comment><USER12> > If I were them, I'd either have yearly revisions, or hardware levels.

They'll probably end up using something like the Windows Experience Index. People shouldn't have to worry about the specifics of their CPU, etc. unless they want to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting price points. According to Engadget they are from $500 all the way to $6000, although not all of them have been announced.

[http://www.engadget.com/2014/01/06/valve-steam-machines- spec...](http://www.engadget.com/2014/01/06/valve-steam-machines-specs/)

</comment><comment><USER14> I find the exact hardware much less exciting than the controller and OS.

If valve wants this to succeed they better pour a lot of money into the making current steam libraries work on linux properly. I want linux as my daily driver.

</comment><comment><USER15> Interesting to see alienware on the list, since they already sell gaming PCs intended for living room use. How will this fit into their existing lineup?

The only concrete differences I can see would be the OS , which would seem inferior to just shipping windows+steam out of the box at this point; and the controller. But I always assumed the controller would be compatible with regular Windows PCs anyway (and I assume they will be available separately).

</comment><comment><USER12> Curious what it is about this pdf that makes Chrome's pdf reader hit 100% cpu and not make it past the second page:

[http://media.steampowered.com/store/steammachines/SteamMachi...](http://media.steampowered.com/store/steammachines/SteamMachinesBroc_WEB.PDF)

Works fine, readable in preview.

<comment><USER16> That is one tough PDF. It's loading in Firefox (UX) here but is balky.

<comment><USER3> The PDF is quite small and loads in a second from Scribd

[http://www.scribd.com/doc/196758024/Steam-Machines-CES- broch...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/196758024/Steam-Machines-CES-brochure)

Since it has taken more than 30 minutes to load just two pages in Firefox from [http://media.steampowered.com](http://media.steampowered.com) then it must be a different problem....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Since Steam Machines == Linux Machines, I'm going to celebrate this as a list of companies that are now fully supporting Linux OOB. I expect similarly configured boxes showing up in their retail channels sans a Microsoft OS.

</comment><comment><USER18> As someone who already has a gaming computer as an HTPC, I really just want to buy the steam controller. It looks like it isnt for sale yet, however =(

</comment><comment><USER19> "Steam, now on Origin" will be a great slogan.

</comment><comment><USER20> Is this the end or the start of the beginning?

<comment><USER21> This is a new way of marketing gaming pc's of mid-range price group. You no longer will have to know what gtx780 is and how to build a decent machine. It will also be convenient for media playback. Some kind of a revised htpc that you don't have to worry about, but still allows you to replace almost anything inside (try doing that with a ps4 or xbox one).

<comment><USER3> Except people will still need to figure those things out to decide which of the many different Steam Boxes to buy....

Oth3erwise, the PC and gaming industry strategies are completely different. With consoles, the hardware is more or less fixed, but later developments (eg die shrinks) are used to reduce the price. With PCs, the price is maintained fairly constant over the short term but later developments are used to increase the performance or whatever is fashionable (eg maintain or reduce the performance but make it thinner).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The only problem with Steam Machines TODAY is just that so many of the games right now are Windows only. That is changing FAST, but there is a whole backlog of Windows games that is not moving to Linux soon.

<comment><USER23> Valve is working on game streaming, which will hopefully solve this problem. While not the best solution, though, it will certainly help.

See: [https://steamcommunity.com/groups/homestream](https://steamcommunity.com/groups/homestream)</comment></comment>


Gov.uk content should be published in HTML and not PDF (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2018/07/16/why-gov-uk-content-should-be-published-in-html-and-not-pdf/ <comment><USER2> PDF seems to fit a world-view where the highest objective of a document is to be printed on paper.

From a machine-parsing perspective PDF files are a nightmare. Chunks of text may be broken anywhere, mid-sentence, mid-word. These chunks may appear in the document in any order.

Spaces may be encoded as spaces, or they may be created a number of other ways, like by positioning chunks, or setting character spacing per character.

The mapping from code point to glyph does not need to be pure Unicode, a PDF document may contain a custom font with additional glyphs.

This is all stuff I learned by trying to parse a limited set of PDFs found in the wild.

All of these gotchas are by the way completely PDF/A compliant.

<comment><USER3> >From a machine-parsing perspective PDF files are a nightmare.

Can someone with experience care to explain why? Does it have to do with each letter having an absolute position on the document? I have no clue, to be honest.

<comment><USER4> You have to essentially render the document yourself in order to figure out what the order of chunks is. Then you _might_ be able to extract content from the chunks you're interested in - or not. A given zipped chunk might be literally anything.

Didier Stevens is the best expert of PDFs that I know of: [https://blog.didierstevens.com/programs/pdf- tools/](https://blog.didierstevens.com/programs/pdf-tools/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why not both? Wasn't the point of the PDF/A ISO standard to use it for archiving? I always felt PDF is better for content like this than HTML which can change dynamically

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A)

VeraPDF also exist for PDF/A validation [https://github.com/verapdf](https://github.com/verapdf)

<comment> crooked-v > I always felt PDF is better for content like this than HTML which can change > dynamically

It's not that hard to edit a PDF file either, though.

<comment><USER6> That's not the issue, the problem is we don't know what a document wood look like with next years browser or if it will render at all. That isn't an issue with PDF.

<comment><USER7> The same applies to PDFs too. There are hundreds of PDF readers and not all of them support all the features besides feature deprecation. You could run flash in PDFs, so archived PDFs that utilized that will be broken.

<comment><USER8> Hence the aforementioned PDF/A, which is a version with a fixed set of features: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I painstakingly convert some PDFs from Boston and Massachusetts government into HTML and people prefer them for the flexibility and accessibility.

My workflow is to use pdftohtml then edit the result as Markdown and screenshot the figures before converting to HTML with pandoc.

I have been pushing to publish in HTML from the get-go, in part by citing this blog, with some success.

For example, the Massachusetts Secretary of the Office of Environmental Affairs recently published a typed letter as a raster PDF, which I converted into [https://nattaylor.com/eastboston/blog/2019/3247-2017-logan-a...](https://nattaylor.com/eastboston/blog/2019/3247-2017-logan- airport-espr/) from [https://eeaonline.eea.state.ma.us/EEA/emepa/mepacerts/2019/s...](https://eeaonline.eea.state.ma.us/EEA/emepa/mepacerts/2019/sc/eir/3247%20-%202017%20Logan%20Airport%20ESPR.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER10> Best idea would probably be a download option for good, oldfashioned XML and providing a nice XLST-stylesheet for transformation into HTML/processing to pdf. This approach would ensure that you still can reliably save/read the content (compared to responsive JS-nightmares) in the future...

<comment><USER11> I think it would be best to have plain HTML available for download (without any JS or any other cruft). Even .epub (e-books) is just zipped HTML with some extra parts.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17541045](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17541045)

</comment><comment><USER12> I really like the work of the UK's GDS (government digital service)

<comment> toby- Me too. Focusing on digital services was, and remains, one of the few things the UK government has got right in recent years, IMHO - and excelled at.

<comment><USER13> Is it anything to do with the government _per se_ , or is it driven entirely by civil servants?

<comment><USER6> Francis Maude was the MP responsible for a lot of that. He was the only politician I ever heard talk about lean practices in software.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Maude#Return_to_Govern...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Maude#Return_to_Government,_2010–2016)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting about PDFs. I think they still have some uses though, like scanned documents (like court records), downloadable books... I know some software with invoicing for say hosting might offer a downloadable version created with some script, but just spiting out a web page is probably easier in that case, and still printable.

However I know some PDFs don't even let you select text, they just scan in something it seems. I noticed that even for some government sites, like some city had their ordinances in PDFs that looked like they were typed up on a computer or type writer, signed by someone, scanned in and re-uploaded. Selectable text not only useful for blind people, but searching the page or copying/pasting parts of it for research, a bit of a SEO boost too probably as not sure if robots try to parse text in images even though it's probably very possible with machine learning. I know though there's been lawsuits that government websites have to be accessible but it seems like many cities and even some higher levels sites aren't taking this seriously. Not sure if they are just unaware, under budget or maybe just older sites but if they rebuilt a more modern one it'd be better. I remember reading somewhere on HN once that some city but I forget which one but they just deleted their website and replaced it with a plain text web page since people complained, so now if you need anything you got to go city hall. So basically negates having a website in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER15> While PDF is supposed to be an open standard I'm noticing more and more functionality in PDF files that isn't supported by readers who implement the open standard. I have project right now to find out why Adobe and Chrome are so different and, though it's obvious to me, the loss of functionality because Chrome doesn't support certain things must be explained to those to whom it is not so obvious.

<comment><USER11> IIRC, implementing the PDF standard requires a JavaScript implementation. To many readers, that's not worth it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> My municipal government insists on sending out via email attached PDFs or links to download PDFs.

Some of the PDFs are prepared by the government, others by vendors working for the government (probably based on specs that called for this experience). It ignores the facts that many (if not most) people read on small screen devices, don't have logon credentials handy, or even know where to find downloaded documents. It erodes civic engagement and leads to real problems when policies aren't followed or generate backlash because people didn't know about them prior to changes.

The simplest thing to do would be just to send the damn data as plaintext email. The mayor actually gets this -- her newsletters are always in the body of the email itself, never as a PDF attachment or link to download a PDF. Yet her administration is still stuck on PDFs for everything.

</comment><comment><USER17> It was refreshing to get a notice about cookie settings which when ignored, accepted or rejected remained readily accessible (on mobile at least). Normally, you get to reject setting once and then it vanishes meaning you can't update your choice either way. It was a pleasant surprise to be able to change my mind.

<comment><USER18> >Normally, you get to reject setting once and then it vanishes meaning you can't update your choice either way.

Funny how you phrase it. Normally dark websites lets you accept the setting and never show it to you again, so you wouldn't change your mind. If you reject it - you get a redirect or a nagging screen which lets you change your mind and accept.

<comment><USER19> Having to have a separately implemented version of this on every website in the world is the dark pattern. Browsers already let you white- or black-list individual domains for cookies; it's crazy that every website design has to accommodate this redundant feature that is never going to be possible to implement perfectly for all use cases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> When I worked at GDS the aim was to use PDF's they were considered to have a long shelf life, where as HTML and the web in general can evolve and leave some people without a way to read it. I wonder whats changed?

<comment><USER21> PDFs aren't and have never been accessible, and PDFs aren't and have never been reactive. Administrations are just finding out how frustrating the format is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> No. Terrible idea. The authors take the perspective that content should be easy for browsers to render. That's important but shouldn't be the only consideration. Browsers can render HTML well, but browsers have incredibly complicated rendering engines. This makes HTML non-portable and non- exportable, not printable, not sharable. I'm sure for each one of those you can create a workaround to bridge the gap but the big picture is that HTML content tends to be dynamic and rendered by a heavy server component from database which makes creating a true standard actually quite hard. HTML actually really sucks as a portable document standard without some extra semantic definition and a container format. So to make HTML workable you have to do something like what docx and odf do: XML definition+resources in zip container ... which now look a lot like PDF.

>We also intend to build functionality for users to automatically generate accessible PDFs from HTML documents.

How about the other way.. PDFs -> HTML documents.

<comment><USER23> > We also intend to build functionality for users to automatically generate > accessible PDFs from HTML documents. This would mean that publishers will > only need to create and maintain one document, but users will still be able > to download a PDF if they need to.

Oh I see you've added that. The problem with PDF to HTML is thst your trying to fit something static back into something dynamic. I also don't see how pdf rendering is any less complicated. There are many browser implementations that can easily render gov.uk without issues.

<comment><USER22> This raises the question of how they create these 'HTML documents'. As far as I'm aware, there really isn't an HTML document format. More than likely, these documents will be created by some web-based system (maybe even proprietary and cloud-based, making portability extremely hard) and simply exported as PDF later. That's how every web-based content management system does it today. It's very convenient _right now_ , but when it comes to document maintenance for the next few decades, I'm not sure that's better than something like PDF or ODF.

<comment><USER24> The code is available on GitHub, you can see for yourself. It's mostly written in a customised markdown variant called Govspeak[0].

You appear to be jumping to ridiculous conclusions. Decisions on how we deliver content are made on the back of a _huge amount_ of research. It's more accessible than it's ever been, other governments and organisations are following our lead.

To suggest PDF, ODF or other crippled, inaccessible, OS-constrained formats over HTML - something everyone can read with any of their devices - shows you need to do more research before posting your ill-informed views.

[0] [https://github.com/alphagov/govspeak](https://github.com/alphagov/govspeak)

Edit: Also, web page have plenty of other advantages. Indexed by every search engine, bookmarkable/shareable headings. What other medium offers that?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Isolating Migrations from EF for use with tools like Dapper - <AUTHOR> https://data.uservoice.com/forums/72025-entity-framework-feature-suggestions/suggestions/6286054-isolate-the-migrations-from-ef

<comment><AUTHOR> As a .Net developer, i dig Entity Framework (for ease, quick to start, ...).

But sometimes, EF isn't fit and i'd like to use tools like Dapper (backed by Stackoverflow). I'd would be nice to know that EF Migrations is available seperatly from the main package.

So i thought to post it on the UserVoice of MS. But i'm curious, what are you guys using as alternative for EF Migrations ?</comment>


Is reading wife's e-mail a crime?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.freep.com/article/20101226/NEWS03/12260530/1011/NEWS09/&template=fullarticle <comment><USER2> A recent ruling in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the government must get a warrant to read stored emails [1]. The opinion was in large part based on the "fundamental similarities between email and traditional forms of communication" [2]. Having established that the 4th amendment does indeed apply to email, the question is how the 4th amendment works between spouses. In Burdeau v. McDowell the Supreme Court ruled that "the origin and history [of the Fourth Amendment] clearly show that it was intended as a restraint upon the activities of sovereign authority, and was not intended to be a limitation upon other than governmental agencies" [3]. Further, in the Supreme Court ruled that (emphasis mine) "[the Fourth Amendment] does not apply to a search or seizure, _even an unreasonable one_ , effected by a private individual not acting as an agent of the Government or with the participation or knowledge of any governmental official." [4] Thus I'm not sure under what legal basis reading your spouse's email could be considered a crime (although ethically it is reprehensible).

(Note, no training as a lawyer. Just interested in the law.)

[1] [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/breaking-news-eff- vict...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/breaking-news-eff-victory- appeals-court-holds)

[2] <https://www.eff.org/files/warshak_opinion_121410.pdf>

[3] <http://supreme.justia.com/us/256/465/case.html>

[4] <http://supreme.justia.com/us/447/649/case.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> I find the poll rather offensive:

 _Should it be legal to snoop into your spouse's e-mail?_

 _-No way! Privacy is a basic right, even in a marriage_

 _-Sure, why not? How else can I keep tabs on him/her?_

Why does the second option have to be framed from the perspective that anyone who logs into their spouse's email is doing so to keep tabs on them? What's wrong with a simple "Yes/No"? This isn't a webforum of friends joking around, this is a legitimate press entity.

<comment><USER4> I found it offensive too. My wife has full access to my email/facebook/bank and everything. Just this weekend my wife ordered something in my name and thus used my email. I don't see it as a problem.

Like my wife said one time: "If you were cheating on me, I wouldn't know how to track it online." Not because she's not technologically adept, but because she's seen me using proxy servers and disposable emails that she knows I wouldn't be dumb enough to do it in plain sight. Just like it'd be moronic to receive love letter correspondence at my home address, it's moronic to receive it at my main email address.

I'll also clarify further. The woman prosecuting _is a moron_ for using her normal email address (with her password in a book next to the computer) to conduct an affair. If you don't try to hide it, you're trying to get caught. I'm sorry, I was computer savvy enough at 4 to start up a PC and use DOS to load a game. A 6-10 year old today would beyond the shadow of a doubt be able to access her email - therefore it was unprotected.

<comment><USER5> You don't lose your right to privacy just because you are a moron.

<comment><USER4> I'd say the traces on Facebook/Myspace/Twitter would beg to differ, but legally speaking you're right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is how Oakland County Prosecutor Jessica Cooper describes "knowing wife's password and logging into gmail":

 _"The guy is a hacker," Cooper said in a voice mail response to the Free Press last week. "It was password protected, he had wonderful skills, and was highly trained. Then he downloaded them and used them in a very contentious way."_

<comment><USER7> > _Leon Walker told the Free Press he routinely used the computer and that she > kept all of her passwords in a small book next to the computer._

Wish I had skills like that. I wonder where he was trained to hack computers, I'd love to reach that level some day.

<comment><USER8> When I read that portion, I was amazed that this action was brought. I don't know what is motivating the prosecutor but I doubt it is a sense of justice.

<comment><USER7> He caught her having an affair. I doubt justice is on her mind; more like vengeance, and this showed up as something to get angry over. As to the prosecuting _lawyer_... probably money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is this any different than opening her physical mail or reading her diary? I doubt you'd go to jail for 5 years for either of those...

<comment><USER4> Agreed, her case also becomes non-existent if she's ever asked him to access her email for her. My wife knows all my passwords and I know all hers. Furthermore this is dangerous territory for the prosecution not only on the appearance front (it looks like a frivolous suit) but the precedence could collapse the judicial service in the state when kids sue their parents over snooping in their email/facebook and finding out they smoke pot or had sex.

I'd also like to point out how dangerous fighting the letter of the law is. From what I can tell in Michigan adultery is still a felony on the books and could land both the wife and the man she had sex with in jail. Prosecuting over an invasion of privacy is exceptionally stupid when you have to full-out admit to a felony that is still on the books but is unprosecuted.

<comment><USER10> I wonder if an adultery charge would even hold up in court anymore. I think the "right to privacy" (which is sort of an unenumerated constitutional right, but which has tons of legal precedent) might actually preclude actually prosecuting someone for adultery.

<comment><USER11> As far as I know, we're all just waiting for a state prosecutor to be dumb enough to bring an adultery case so these statutes can be struck down by the Supreme Court nationwide once and for all. It's (apparently) been years since the last case was filed; the ACLU had the guy's back, but he let it go in exchange for 20 hours community service and no record.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What's yours is mine and mine is yours.

Abuse of trust? Yes. Crime? No.

<comment><USER11> Theft of postal service mail has been a crime since 1948. It apparently comes up all the time during divorce disputes (though for obvious reasons it isn't routinely prosecuted). Why should email be any different? The ECPA is decades old and covers exactly this issue.

<comment><USER12> So is reading someone else's postal mail theft?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Commented here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2044097>

Nut: according to the WSJ, this couple was separated when the husband accessed the wife's email address. That being the case, the husband had absolutely no right to access the wife's private property; the husband straight-up broke the law. Michigan isn't a community property state, but even in Texas, once you're separated, what's yours is yours.

Just because you use a shared machine doesn't mean you've surrendered your accounts to anyone else who uses the machine. The law does not say that you have to employ state-of-the-art mechanisms to protect your email. Your password can be "password"; _it's still unlawful to break into the account_.

</comment><comment><USER13> Reading your wife's email _is_ a crime. It's a horrible violation of privacy, and borders on abuse.

Of course a woman reading a husband's email is normal.

</comment><comment><USER14> In related news: [http://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-18/dc-18-presentations/Z...](http://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-18/dc-18-presentations/Zoz/Zoz- Pwned-by-the-Owner.pdf)

I wonder what the legal consequences are when you log into the accounts of someone who stole your laptop (that you can still access via SSH).

Are you even allowed to snoop on what happens on your laptop locally?

<comment><USER11> Laptop thieves have lost cases trying to claim an expectation of privacy on stolen laptops, but "not because of a bright line rule that thieves never have a reasonable expectation of privacy in stolen property" (Florida Second District Court of Appeals). That case was the police looking at the laptop itself; presumably, if you lifted a cookie out of the browser config on your stolen laptop and sidejacked the thief's email account, her cause of action against you would not get weaker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Prosecutors can charge people with all sorts of things. I seriously doubt this will stick.

I have a friend who is politically active around a certain cause -- the details are not important -- and I've noticed that he receives an "update" every day or two with the most outlandish sorts of news. Of course, in a country of 300+ million, odds are something unusual are going on every day. To read the accounts as he does suggests there is some vast conspiracy at work. But to take an honest look at the numbers just shows that, given the randomness of people's behavior, every once in a million times something happens that would piss him off. The rest is just a result of the large number of people and the efficiency of the reporting systems involved.

So I'm assuming that new law isn't being explored, and this is just another example of this phenomenon I've noticed with my friend. What I'm interested in, however, is how the prosecutor came up with the idea to criminally charge him? Did the wife file criminal charges on her own (which I suspect)? I can't imagine this being an issue that the state would have any interest in pursuing. Part of a lame-brain divorce lawyer's case, sure, but not a matter of law enforcement.

Of course, I'm not a lawyer and don't even play one on TV, so whatever you do, don't put any trust in any legal analysis I might give.</comment>


Google+ Should Add Public Circles - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/3-product-improvements-that-would-be-a-plus-for-google-2011-7

<comment><USER2> People keep on asking for this.

See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2753115> for previous discussion of this suggestion when it was made by the creator of minecraft.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> HN: What else would you improve on Google+?

<comment><USER3> Integration with Tumblr.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How could I sell stock online - <AUTHOR>

I realize the selling of stock is highly regulated. However, is it possible to use an existing broker's api? I am thinking something like paypal but for stocks? If thats not possible, is there some other way to do this without incurring more costs than a startup could handle? <comment><USER2> IB:

<http://interactivebrokers.com/>

they have matlab, java, etc. connectors

You can also work with some of the larger banks and boutique firms, either in a DMA setting or routing through the exchange. Generally you need 100-250 to get that solution going, and you need to use FIX or the exchange proprietary protocols (e.g ITCH/OUCH for nasdaq)

<comment><AUTHOR> Or, better yet, you just taught me a new term called DMA which I can now google and get to understand better. Are there other terms I could be googling to find this solution?

<comment><USER2> I apologize for the jargon [I'm at work now and the markets dont close for another 100 minutes] -- I can give you a more detailed explanation later if you are interested.

<comment><AUTHOR> the reason I dont like paper trading systems is one bc without real money transacted, I cant make money and two bc I think having some skin in the game changes everything. But I realize after talking to you that this may be an unrealistic dream.

<comment><USER2> I have a lot of respect for the idealism underpinning your motivation. That's partially why I got into finance in the first place.

You can also

1) charge for the advise. Something relatively small but accessible to most people. THAT would be a game changer :)

2) pitch the idea to fidelity or some other consumer facing brokerage. If you have good material, brokerage companies love it.

3) fake the trades. For example, Lehman Europe [LBIE] used to allow for infinite leverage by simulating each position (withdrawing money from the account when clients bought, and replenishing when they sold again). So you could do the following:

\- hold the positions that you advocate \- when people want to "buy" the signal (buy when you say buy, sell when you say sell), then basically sell the exposure to their account \- when people want to "sell" the signal (opposing you), then just take a naked position. Ostensibly, if your signals are good, then you should make money :)

I would highly recommend learning about finance via a trading job or internship. There are a lot of subtleties involved. Not that you couldn't learn by reading a bunch of books, but finance is highly regulated and its important to understand all the ins and outs :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Two years later – did Traefik replace Nginx and HAproxy? - <AUTHOR> https://arador.com/two-years-later-did-traefik-replace-nginx-and-haproxy/ <comment><AUTHOR> Any Traefik users here that actually did this?

<comment><USER2> I recently pivoted out of my org's DevOps & SRE team to something in middle- management and product facing (many drinks have been spilled over this decision) and one of my colleagues who still works on that team pushed traefik enough that the team pivoted to it.

I couldn't tell you if it was the right or effective decision any more quickly than I could tell you he's been battling with it constantly since getting the greenlight from his PM to do so. Exposure is admittedly limited to hearing about the struggles the team has faced through the water-cooler/coffee room chats.

<comment><AUTHOR> A lot of people seem to struggle with initial setup.

There's a lot of threads at [https://www.reddit.com/r/Traefik/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Traefik/) about that but there's also a ton of guides and help so I'm not sure why there's so much struggle.

Maybe it's because they're so used to doing it with nginx.

<comment><USER2> To be completely fair I think the struggles I've been hearing about are of the PEBKAC variety, having worked with the operator for a couple of years before the aforementioned pivot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "Access denied"</comment>


Apple CEO Tim Cook says monopolies aren't bad if they aren't abused - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-apple-monopolies-not-bad-if-not-abused-2019-12 <comment><USER2> There are 2 types of monopolies: 1) given by goverments. 2) made by free market rules.</comment>


Ask HN: What did you make in Django? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> A while back I created the Django Hackathon Starter [1] which was aimed to be a general boilerplate providing several out-of-the box OAuth hooks and API examples. It hasn't been updated recently, but was a pretty fun project to work on at the time.

[1] [https://github.com/DrkSephy/django-hackathon- starter](https://github.com/DrkSephy/django-hackathon-starter)

</comment><comment><USER3> I made a bunch of things in Django as side projects, but unfortunately haven't managed to launch anything. One reason is that I don't have enough time due to my day job, and another is that I loose interest when these side projects become hard :-/. But anyway:

\- A version of caniuse.com, but for modern C++

\- A website for going out in my city, scraping the web for events and displaying it all in one place (e.g. 80s night here, techno there, ...)

\- A real life bugtracker for my city. There is a pothole / ridiculous intersection / missing playground? Open an issue! I think this one especially has potential.

Django makes it easy for data-centric sites. Just whip up a few models and templates, and start adding data using the admin interface, or by scraping.

</comment><comment><USER4> I built a dating site with django.

It's no longer maintained, and most likely not functioning, but still running on Heroku. (tangerine.herokuapp.com)

Here is what it looked like : [http://imgur.com/a/aOgf1](http://imgur.com/a/aOgf1)

</comment><comment><USER5> I've built a couple dozen projects in Django, mostly closed source or for private companies. It's a really powerful framework for web apps, APIs (with DRF), and the ORM is very quick to get a prototype running as well. Django is awesome.

</comment><comment><USER6> I created the life-goal sharing site bucketlist.org in Django about six years ago. Super fun side project. Maintained it myself for a couple of years, then sold it to some passionate investors who have done a good job keeping it alive and thriving.

I've also created several university web sites and intranets, worked for years on a journalism project/publication, and am currently working on a massive Django-driven portal for an arts college in California.

</comment><comment><USER7> Not something I created from scratch, but I had the chance to work on a very large Django codebase at TVSquared.

We ended up taking out most of stock Django and only using the router and controller functions.

<comment><USER8> Why did you do that, and what did you replace stock django with?

<comment><USER7> We only used the router, handler functions and the template engine. We didn't use any models (because we used the MongoDB api directly) or the Object- Oriented controllers, and (if I remember correctly), fairly limited use of the fancier forms API.

So it was a fairly minimal subset of Django.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I started working on a Django project, customizing RapidSMS [0]. It worked so well, and we moved to the next iteration of SMS platform called RapidPro [1], building dashboards in Django to display data collected.

DRF+AngularJs is the killer here.

[0] : [https://www.rapidsms.org](https://www.rapidsms.org) [1] : [http://app.rapidpro.io](http://app.rapidpro.io)

</comment><comment><USER10> We built a multi-lingual platform on top of Django (e.g. [https://www.caremondo.com/en/orthopaedics/](https://www.caremondo.com/en/orthopaedics/) being the main app), which was recently acquired. Apart from form-handling facepalms, the rest has been quite a breeze.

</comment><comment><USER11> A platform for publishing fiction:

[http://fictionhub.io](http://fictionhub.io)

A website where you can discover educational videos:

[http://lumiverse.io](http://lumiverse.io)

</comment><comment><USER12> Nothing. Its just as much of a turd as Rails is. Using flask instead for simple apps.

<comment><USER8> Would you be more specific as to why you prefer flask to django?

I looked at flask, and the code for views doesn't look much different. It does look like it's missing form and model validation. Do you use a library for that or do you not do that?

<comment><USER13> For forms, the usual solution is WTForms library with the help of flask-wtf extension glue that provides Flask-specific convenience functionality.

Flask has somewhat minimalistic core, with significantly less batteries included, compared to Django, and this gives somewhat more freedom in choices of components.

This was more true when Django was less mature (0.9x and early 1.x times), when a lot of things were much less flexible there, while Flask had somewhat more active community than it has today... but it probably still holds.

I believe, both are great frameworks. What to use depends on what one wants to build, how well it aligns with the framework's assumptions and "best practices", and one's personal affinities.</comment></comment></comment>


Lisp for the 21st Century - <AUTHOR> http://www.lambdassociates.org/lC21.htm

<comment><USER2> Starter Pack is another effort that addresses some of the noted deficiencies in Common Lisp.

<http://weitz.de/starter-pack/>

Technically, the whole project including GUI installer only works on LispWorks. However, the selection of libraries makes a good approximation to a CL standard library and it's not too hard to figure out how to install all of them in SBCL or whatever other CL implementation you have. This gets you much closer to the starting point of a "batteries included" language like Python.

If every CL implementation in the world simply bundled all of the libraries in Starter Pack, a lot of the legitimate criticisms of CL would be solved.

(If you are one of those people who just say "too many parentheses", however, there is no help for you.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Heh... From reading the first part of this, I rather expected it to be an implementation of a Lisp-like language (complete with first-class functions, macros, the whole deal, maybe sans some of the bloat) on top of some other runtime environment like Java or Python. That would give the developer the power of Lisp with the libraries of some other language.

It quickly became apparent that it was just an attempt to "dumb down" Lisp.

Incidentally, does anyone know of a (mature) language that does the above? Preferably derived from Scheme? I have really wanted to use this for some time, but I've resisted implementing it myself, thinking that "Someone MUST have done this by now..." As it happens, people have, but it's typically more of an "I hacked this together last weekend; please don't actually use it for anything!" type project.

<comment><USER3> Well, go figure -- not an hour after I post this, I find Kawa: <http://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/>

I remember finding this before, but for some reason deciding it was not what I wanted. I can't find anything important missing, though... Cool.

<comment><USER4> I was about to post saying you must not have looked very hard. I've been using Kawa successfully for years. Its biggest fault is that there are so few bugs that I'm not motivated to keep up with new releases.

There is at least one other JVM-based Scheme implementation out there, and it's stable and well maintained too.

<comment><USER5> I remember looking at Bigloo a long time ago, but I haven't kept up with the development.

<comment><USER4> Bigloo is a Scheme compiler that supports the JVM as one of its back-end targets.

Kawa is a JVM compiler that supports Scheme as one of its front-end languages.

SISC is an interpreter that runs on the JVM. There are other Scheme interpeters for the JVM, but SISC is the most prominent and said to be the fastest interpreter. In some tests it even beat the Kawa compiler.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Looks like pg hurry things up with getting Arc out or Qi will beat it to become the 21st century 100 Year Language. :)

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow - what a great effot. I'm definitely looking forward to the 2008 version which includes web programming.

</comment><comment><USER7> And #FFFFFF on #000000 for the 20th.

</comment><comment><USER8> Do efforts to save Lisp just detract from the growth of functional programming in general?

<comment><USER9> (1) Lisp isn't (just) a functional programming language.

(2) Why should lisp advocates care about "functional programming in general"?

<comment><USER8> I agree with (1), but most "functional" languages aren't just functional.

As for (2) -- "A rising tide lifts all boats."</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook, Google and Apple lobby for curb to NSA surveillance - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/17/facebook-google-apple-lobby-senate-nsa-surveillance

<comment><AUTHOR> One can skeptical or one can be hopeful. Regardless, this is encouraging news.

Just the fact that they are lobbying at all, is great in itself. The tech industry needs better representation.</comment>


Q&A with IT at Penny Arcade - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/cr5zc/iama_tech_guy_for_penny_arcade_ama/

<comment><AUTHOR> Apparently they use Tarsnap at PA, which is awesome.</comment>


Black Mesa, a Half-Life Fan Fantasy, Finally Comes to Life - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/black-mesa-half-life/ <comment><USER2> FYI Article includes spoilers for OG Half Life.

As someone who spent years making a mod it's heartwarming to see others cross the finish line. And it looks like a much bigger upgrade than the official Half Life Source. Kudos to the modders and Valve for not shutting it down.

This article provides a nice intro with a little bit of background. Not too in depth.</comment>


Google announces layoffs? - <AUTHOR> http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2008/03/11/google_announce.html

<comment><USER2> Misleading title. They only did layoffs at DoubleClick, typical for a merger.

<comment><USER3> Not that typical in a merger, especially a "growth seeking" merger (like what Google does) vs "cost cutting" merger, like what Oracle does.

This is unusual for Google, for sure. What that tells about them (i.e growth expectations etc) is anyone guess ...

<comment><USER4> I disagree. I think this is very typical. This is Google's largest acquisition and one of the the few that isn't a startup.

When a company does an acquisition of this size there is bound to be numerous redundancies, specifically in the HR department.

For another example consider EMC and RSA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article reminded me of the comedy "translation" of Adobe's aquisition of Macromedia done some years ago. <http://daringfireball.net/2005/04/adobe_translation></comment>


Why you must patch the new Linux sudo security hole - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-you-must-patch-the-new-linux-sudo-security-hole/ <comment><USER2> This only affects selinux installations</comment>