Prosody + a couple of modules with Conversations.im and Gajim can be serious alternative to commercial offerings. End to end encrypted chats, history sync and seamless image / file sharing works as good or even better than Hangouts. I’ve been using this setup with a friend for several months and it works so surprisingly well that I’m seriously considering migrating my entire family to XMPP.

There is also an option for running connections via Tor (both hidden service for the server and client connections) for the truly paranoid.

Well the usual reasoning is that tags are for filtering things out. So it’s logical to have philosophy tag for people that don’t like philosophy but are there people that don’t like open source / free software so much that they want to filter it out of the view?

Add it but make it only available for suggesting (not initially) and add negative hotness modifier to move it quicker out of the front page. That would make it a lightweight “flag”.

usable link: http://eta-lang.org/

Totally agree with the “use a yubikey” thing. It solves problems I was hung up on solving myself (like how to manage keys on all the machines I used).

Edit: Though, I don’t fully like yubikey - the form factor is dang near perfect.. but their implementations are not fully open source. NitroKey seems to be more in line with open sourcedness, but they are currently lacking the form factor.

I can already hear the groans: “But I have to be online for my job.” I don’t care.

I don’t. I use dash for offline docs. And even when I’m online, since it’s much faster to search the docs locally than over the internet.

Ugh… this is just… so muddled on multiple levels.

Let’s start with PGP - PGP is a software suite currently developed by Symantec. Perhaps he meant GPG:

To help maintain this nerd street cred, pretty much every PGP guide on the Internet (and there are a lot of PGP guides on the Internet) has loads of arcane obscure weird commands to run. How to set up sub keys.

Because there are numerous GPG tutorials out there. For the record GPG and PGP both implement the same standard: OpenPGP.

Personally I think people want “easy encryption & security” but the fundamental problem is that one can’t outsource trust management. In the end one need to understand on a deeper level how security tools work even if they are “arcane obscure weird commands” initially. If they don’t want to maybe they don’t need more security than is already provided by TLS (e.g. HTTPS).

Other than that it doesn’t matter that much how you configure your PGP environment.

Well of course it matters as people have been compromised because of trivial mistakes like leaving version info in their messages.

The main problem with the YubiKey is that they tend to go missing, in which case you’ll lose access to all your emails.

Usually the encryption key is stored in key escrow, that means one generate it on an offline laptop and copies to all hardware tokens. Just like the master key.

Try to avoid PGP for more secure protocols instead (e.g. Signal, WhatsApp, even XMPP+OTR)

OMEMO is the new standard for encryption for XMPP. It offers several benefits over OTR like offline messages and support for multiple devices.

The main drawback of OpenPGP is that it doesn’t support forward secrecy so leaked key exposes all previous messages.

GolfScript has interesting similarities with Rebol: if a variable points to a function it is executed directly. In Rebol that can be suppressed with :token, in GolfScript one has to wrap a token, like so: {token}.

Function arguments in GolfScript are directly taken from the stack while Rebol uses some “heuristics” based on number of arguments of a function and has special behavior for operators.

Kind of a bummer that it goes directly to C++. I was hoping to see how to finish the job in Rust.

can’t wait for all that cryptographically signed malware

Is this interesting if it doesn’t have any features to be able to process English and extract semantic understanding rather than just have its own new completely fixed syntax that you have to learn? you may as well just learn the thing you’re trying to do directly instead of the betty syntax…

here is how it matches if you want to count something.

match = command.match(/^count\s+(?:the\s+)?(?:total\s+)?(?:number\s+of\s+)?(words?|lines?|char(?:acter)?s?)\s+in\s+(.+)$/i) ||
        command.match(/^how\s+many\s+(words?|lines?|char(?:acter)?s?)\s+are(?:\s+there)?\s+in\s+(.+)$/i)

.. so with any other natural English syntax other than the fixed ones it’s programmed for, it won’t work.

Nice talk! Pony is definitely one of the languages I am keeping my eye on.

Interesting note about the string + operator. Java compiler automatically turns calls to it into StringBuilder’s append calls and doesn’t create any intermediate objects.

Regular lobste.rs readers may already be aware of this, but if you’re interested in Rebol you ought to give the Red programming language a look. It’s a modern language strongly based on Rebol.

While it’s amazingly fast, the inability to run nearly all existing plugins makes it unworkable for me.

Other interesting functions in the Console API: https://www.sitepoint.com/three-little-known-development-console-api-methods/

Can anyone familiar with Nim comment on the quality of the contents? I like the “in Action” part as it shows real examples but would like to learn idiomatic language if possible.

Interesting that it supports Perfect Forward Secrecy by requiring that all messages are signed and appending several keys in payload. I wonder if it’s possible to add something like that to OpenPGP…

Personally I went the usual route (first college then job) but doing the reverse can be really interesting. There are several subjects taught at my college that only after years of working I can say were very high quality but unfortunately during studies I didn’t see it that way. That includes cryptography and systems theory. Actually I remember years ago before Bitcoin existed that one of the assignments was to design virtual currency. We’ve been using EC cryptography and Merkle trees. It’s really something to find the same things in contemporary technology.

I’m assuming that Hackers News is still using continuations? If so, the id for each vote is actually an identifier to a garbage collected (e.g. something that will expire in the future) suspended computation. It’s surprising to me that a site as large as HN can still work this way… Or are they still just using one (beefy) server?