Hacker News Reader

lhmon Final – A credit card built for the 21st century

I wonder if it would be possible to integrate this into existing online banking. Being able to use this through an existing bank account could be a good selling point to privacy-aware customers, at least in Germany.

lhmon What's the most popular Ruby standard library?

Very interesting. I'm now wondering if Travis CI is collecting any code usage statistics? I'd imagine that they would have a more application-centric view on the rubygems ecosystem. Also, since they are actually executing code, they could potentially collect data on constants and method calls, I believe.

lhmon Data protection: Angela Merkel proposes Europe network

This looks rather clueless, I think. As others have mentioned, the problem isn't so much in the interconnects, but more with the services being used. But there isn't going to come a new Facebook or Google out of Berlin - or anywhere else for that matter.

What would be helpful would be decentralized services that match the user experience of the existing ones. But that kind of innovation isn't what's going to be discussed here, I'm afraid. On the contrary, such eavesdropping-safe technology would be viewed very conspicuously by the non-tech savy politicians in Europe and other places.

lhmon Web Framework Benchmarks - Round 8

That looks a lot like an error in the test setup to me, it seems the rails example hasn't been updated for a while.

lhmon Google Acquires Boston Dynamics

> Where could google be heading to?

It's probably worth noting that both Larry Page and Eric Schmidt have invested in Planetary Resources.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Resources [2] http://www.planetaryresources.com/team/

lhmon Rails for Designers - Rails front-end design and development guide

That sounds like a great idea. Do you already have a rough overview of what it is going to cover?

lhmon Very Short Reply Expected

  BRIF - Brief response is fine

lhmon Front-End CSS Frameworks

there's also Susy, which builds on sass and compass: http://susy.oddbird.net/

lhmon Security Incident on FreeBSD Infrastructure

I'm a bit suprised that the affected machines were powered off instead of just disconnected. Would that not make an audit more complicated?

lhmon Bogus story: no Chinese backdoor in military chip

Not evidence, but the product page indicates:

"In addition to supporting portable, consumer, industrial, communications and medical applications with commercial and industrial temperature devices, Actel also offers ProASIC3 FPGAs with specialized screening for automotive and military systems."

http://www.actel.com/products/pa3/

There seems to be a special variant of the chip for military use, hopefully without this 'debugging feature'.

lhmon OpenShift by Red Hat

FWIW, here is a description how different ruby versions are handled with rbenv by 37signals:

https://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv/issues/101#issuecomment...

lhmon WebKit Isn’t Breaking the Web. You Are

Is there someone gathering statistics on css prefix usage in the wild? I think it would be interesting to see some real data on this.

lhmon Csvkit - command line utilities for working with csv files

https://github.com/blambeau/alf is something close, although it does a lot more: "Alf is a commandline tool and Ruby library to manipulate data with all the power of a truly relational algebra approach."