skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The XPS13 appears to have a junk trackpad (no buttons, no middle button) and a messed up keyboard (I don't always use the arrows but when I do, those tiny ones suck.) And no trackpoint? Despite better other specs, poor basic human interaction devices are a showstopper. ThinkPads are the only ones I've seen with fairly good keyboards (even after Lenovo's "redesign").

Dell does have on call service, and in some countries it's better than Lenovo by far. I've had Dell send a guy into a village up a mountain in a 3rd world country, next day (!) whereas I couldn't even figure out how to make a claim with Lenovo in that country (and friends that work for the relevant company there confirm there is no inventory).
Well, people have in fact considered breaking out the Second Amendment to defend encryption...

https://xkcd.com/504/

This doesn't sound as crazy as it might at first glance, once you remember that strong encryption used to be treated as munition, and in some ways still is.
Meh. I think a better reason to use something over $.ajax is the functionality and the API, not because "you don't need jQuery". $.ajax is very general purpose, whereas in most cases you simply need to be able to get and post json. Also, jQuery's promise implementation is one of the least-featured and most awkward to use, which drags down the $.ajax API.
I am disappointed in my president. Of all of his flaws, I think the worst is when he presumes to know both sides of an argument, sets up a straw man, then beats it down. He does this with far too great a regularity.

I believe its very clear, if it hasn't been before, that both major U.S. political parties are not in alignment with those of us in the tech community that understand the issues. At the rate we're going, encryption itself will be regulated before too long. What a Charlie Foxtrot.

I read this morning that some scientists wrote to the Department of Justice asking them to use RICO to investigate climate deniers. RICO, for those of you who don't know, is a draconian law passed in order to deal with large crime syndicates. We were told at the time that vast new powers were needed if the government had a chance against organized crime.

This is relevant because over and over again, we see encroachment on our liberties in terms of "Well, what if there was a ticking nuclear bomb", we adjust the legal system, then find those adjustments being used for political purposes. The same thing will happen with prying in your phone.

I know in my heart that we have crossed the line into a system that's unsustainable over the long run. I fear that this trend is accelerating. It certainly would be nice if we had some governmental body that was concerned with the proper structure and limits on governmental powers. I don't see anybody like that, however. Just a lot of rationalization.
I have found using Elm a real joy, albeit for hobby projects. I do hope pure functional languages become state of the art by 2026.
Studierende is kind of problematic. While Studenten or Studentinnen describes groups of people who study in a university. It's a status. You are matriculated in an university. Therefore you are a Student. Studierende describes people who study. Whatever, wherever. Like study right now. This leads to weird problems.

If you now say that there is a group of students sitting in the bar drinking. It becomes a group of people who sit in a bar to drink and study.
If you want to consider context, be sure to look at more of it. The subjects in question are dead, and cannot further harm anyone. The phone was set to upload information to icloud, and all such information has already been given to the authorities. There is nothing more to be gained from unlocking this phone, except a legal precedent.

Considering the context, this is a power play by the FBI, trying to apply an irrelevant law to further weaken privacy.
XPS 13 has RAM soldered on board
"This
masking strategy would in turn require a power-of-two related memory
size, and there has been a lot of resistance to this too."

A more appropriate title will be "WebAssembly team doesn't want to listen my ideas on how WebAssembly should work".
I completely agree that education is most important.

As for the "manipulation"... generally speaking, nobody ever thinks of themselves as "evil". The well-meaning but simply misinformed or misguided can be just as poor an instructor as someone with malicious intent.

My point is mainly that the president (and other decision-making positions) has to rely on advisers. If those advisers are not providing the necessary, accurate information then they have de facto power over the decision making process. Unlike the coercive strategies, this shift in power can happen without intending it.
Is any of the indices you're describing O(1)? Very, very unlikely.

As for the bulk operations, they're in most cases totally useless. Rendering - maybe, but most of the other CAD operations require precise edge following.

And why even going into all the troubles with using this totally unsuitable relational representation when a proper graph dbms is so much easier? Relational religion is so funny, almost as funny as OOP.
For the US/UK this is the thin end of the wedge. Germany has, in many people's lifetimes, been at the other end.

Have a look at what the Stasi were up to in East Germany until 1989 to understand why Germans feel privacy is important.
This is a nice hacking story. But when you have physical access and expertise you can hack anything. So I don't understand what's so sad about it. I do advocate security in depth, and they should probably have added a few more "layers" of security, like hide the cables and encrypt the network traffic. But then he could just use a screwdriver or pull the encryption key from the device, etc. But they probably judged that stopping kids from playing with it would be enough. The guy is a freaking firmware developer and security expert!
Previously: Adblock Sold to Mystery Company https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10318200
Why are so sure of that?

As a European of 30+ years, I am actually pretty optimistic in that there is, in all areas of politics, a certain point at which EU governments will refuse to follow the US down the rabbit hole.

Germany feels pretty strongly about privacy (albeit not absolute privacy), and I doubt that they will start passing laws just "because the US did it".

UK, I'll give you that. Then again, the UK is culturally closer to the US than to mainland Europe in many ways, this being one of them.
I changed my mind. I was in the corner where I was against all forms of backdoors, but Obama convincd me that there are circumstances that one wants to break encryption. Any governement can ask a judge for a house search warrant if there is good reason to it. We do this for rapists, child pron and in lots of other circumstances. This is the good side of law and order.

So we need to rethink the current situation. The point is that the current proposal is insane. A master key to a backdoor for the US government (not other governments) is a bad idea for many reasons. So are there better alternatives?
Of course there are and I think that we should look at the best alternative such that we keep our privacy AND police can ask a judge to break encryption of a phone or any storage device.

The first and obvious problem is how to break encryption. One could look into a system where the 'backdoor' needs three keys to open; one from a government, one from the supplier and one from a 'independent' agency (I do not present details here, I merely want to show that there may be alternatives looking at). A 3-key backdoor may work and break encyption on phones of rapists, terrorists and suspects of other crimes. Note that every request of the FBI and other agencies will have to go through a public court.

The second problem that I see is the secret orders in the US. There are no guarantees against unlawful behaviour of government agencies if the secret courts continue to exist. One can only have enough privacy if one can defend itself in a public court and the actions of governments are transparent. This is maybe the largest problem to overcome since the US government agencies like their secret powers (too) much. I think that the public cry for encryption and privacy is a reaction to the secret powers of the agencies. One can argue that Apple has enough of the secret powers and choose the path of unbreakable iphones because of this. So if these agencies cannot give gag orders to companies and cannot give secret orders to hand over data about individuals, the public might accept a 3-key backdoor.
Hard Problem: Current internet discussion technology does not allow millions of users to participate in a discussion without loosing overview. In other words: Current discussion protocols do not scale.

A technology providing that could help make our politics more democratic. It could also lower the need for communication hierarchies like in big companies.

I'm doing research in this area and built several prototypes. I strongly believe we can achieve the goal, but doing it with only one teammate researcher makes the process very slow. We are two master degree computer scientists and need a bigger team.

Contact me if you are interested.
Imagine the Falkland War's Vulcan march with hard reboots...
>> We really liked the updated Skylake-powered Dell XPS 13, and its bigger brother, the XPS 15, was also pretty great.

> All the laptops mentioned in the article ship with Intel WiFi.

This is wrong - the XPS 15 does not.

> 02:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM43602 802.11ac Wireless LAN SoC (rev 01)
If you call an international strike for privacy, I'm in. I'm not sure the exposure of the debate will do any favor to public opinions, though.
Writing a Big App in Swift
I have a different 13" laptop with a touchscreen (also Dell, but not XPS), and while I don't use it a huge amount I do quite like being able to quickly tap at stuff now and then. Personally I wouldn't pay more than a very small amount to upgrade to a touchscreen, but I don't mind having it there, and I've not had any issues caused by it at all.

(Disclaimer: I used to work on marketing - Dell was my client, not my employer - for the brand I'm using, which is Alienware. Currently I have no connection to Dell/Alienware other than friends working there and trying to decide whether to keep using my Alienware 13 or to switch to an XPS 13...)
That is obvious, and Ke Jie also said so.
Wikipedia is developing a crowdsourced speech engine
A superb and enchanting glimpse into the world of books, a thousand years before our time. I find it amazing that books already had that kind of importance during an era we call the "dark ages", and that they were being actively spread over much of Europe.

Thanks for sharing!
Ask HN: What hosting provider do you use?
I haven't looked into web hosts in a long time. Is there any that stand out feature/price wise compared to the rest?

Initially I just want a host to get my project online so I don't have any big requirements.
Obviously the chances for humans to win, increase with the board size.

Given the computational power (=number of cpu/gpu) is fixed and the time for each move to be done is fixed.

Perhaps a future "dr. evil / skynet" A.I. will first try to conquer the microchip production plants to increase its computational power and memory. goodbye taiwan, goodbye south korea, goodbye usa...
That sounds great - collaborative investigative journalism for the 21st century!
I haven't seen a trackpad with buttons for 8 years (Apple, Dell, Asus... ditched them between 2008 and 2012). People have chosen a long time ago, and physical trackpad buttons are a curiosity nowadays.
All we need now is a piracy-style commercial to go along with the message:

"You wouldn't encrypt a child you just abducted. You
wouldn't encrypt potassium nitrate you plan to use to
make a bomb and blow up a bulding. You wouldn't encrypt
a stack of cash or a duffel bag of cocaine. So why would
you encrypt information you wish to keep private?"

The reality is that encrypted information may only be evidence of conspiracy, and even with 100% perfect encryption that the government is incapable of decrypting it's the equivalent of doing everything face to face, keeping the information in your head, and remaining silent under the Fifth Amendment. The government can't yet subpoena the contents of your thoughts against your will.

Besides which, as soon as something criminal actually becomes criminal there's physical world, tangible evidence that cannot be encrypted -- the child, the explosive, the stacks of cash. And even if it's a purely digital crime, if there's sufficient suspicion of a crime, the government can get a warrant to install surveillance equipment to watch the device in question and watch the plaintext evidence.
*All the laptops mentioned in the article as shipping with Linux from Dell will in fact come with Intel WiFi.
But that is most likely be because of the structure of Chess. The evaluation of single board position is more "linear" and certainly easier than in Go.

If the utility function is about winning, going though easily-evalutable board positions might be the straightforward route.

If the utility function is to win while minimizing your estimate of of you losing, you might see different results.

Plus if you know that you are playing against a stronger opponent, your prior might bias your perception of the board situation.
> it looks to be a bit less one sided

Yeah, it looks that way but where is the substance?

Why doesn't he openly discuss the pros and cons of both sides to finally reach a conclusion?

"But the dangers are real." is not a rational balancing of reasons. It is just a paranoid statement.
Accelerando[0] starts with this quote, which I really like:

"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."

– Edsger W. Dijkstra

[0] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...
(readable online at http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...)
The phone in question had it's iCloud password reset by someone. It has not uploaded it's contents to iCloud, which is why this is happening.

And so again, context: we're not arguing about whether getting the data is right, we're having some bizarre proxy argument mediated via all-writs which is being framed as an encryption battle, when it is at best a battle over how much compensation Apple should receive for it's work.
A Preliminary Analysis of FSF High Priority Projects Feedback
My impression was that developer salaries were not much if any higher in the UK than in Germany (currency fluctuation may have changed that at the moment, but both seemed to be about 1/2 to 2/3 or US rates last I checked).
In general, minimising a problem with the universal electron-correlation functional is known to in NP due to this [1]. Which is kind of sad for density functional theory (DFT). I've probably misphrased that.

Also, side remark: Coding up a 2D Ising model solver with Metropolis-Hastings is surprisingly fun. Doubly so if you GPU accelerate it.

[1] http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v5/n10/abs/nphys1370.htm...
I like that you pointed out it never prevents the attack, always worth remembering. Does finding connections from an attack work either?
Of course he cares about the lives of children in those countries. At the same time, to call them just accidents, as us laymen use the term, is naive. Do you really think the US government went into these countries thinking they wouldn't kill any civilians? It is not an "oops, I didn't know I would kill civilians." It's an "oops, I didn't mean to kill civilians, but I knew I would. But, we decided it would be worth it."
> English, on the other is awesome for forming phrases that are nearly impossible to translate. "To go to town on somebody" is one I really like, for example.

I think all languages do this. Why would English be specifically better at it than german?
I keep hearing good things about https://surge.sh/
My personal favorite: "Hängematte" (hammock) – a hanging mat (something to be hanged + mat)

While actually borrowed from Haitian "hamáka" (it entered German first in the early 15 hundreds as "Hamaco" or "Hamach"), it was soon adopted in the form of a similar sounding native compound. (Also compare the Dutch "hangmat".) Just few native speakers realize, it's not what it reads.
> If those advisers are not providing the necessary, accurate information then they have de facto power over the decision making process

Yes, but as it pertains to this particular issue, assuming there's no blackmail involved, if the public is informed and there's one political candidate who is for strong encryption, and another who is for backdoors, then we will vote in the man or woman who is for strong encryption. We may have lived with mandated backdoors for 4 or 8 years, but at some point we'll work our way out of that hole, so long as we stay vigilant and root our knowledge-sharing in facts.

Generally speaking, I agree completely that people can and do leave out facts in order to get what they want. Our government isn't free from this sort of manipulation, but I think we have a darned good system set up compared to some others. Lindsey Graham's change of heart on the encryption issue is evidence of that, as is much of the good work done by our government that often goes under-appreciated by the general public. This isn't the first time our government and people have argued over the proper interpretation of laws, and it won't be the last. Let's recall the successful civil rights movements of the past, remember that other countries still do not have some rights that have existed in the US since its founding, and look forward to winning many more. Free speech, women's right to vote, equal rights for all races. Our system isn't perfect but it has led to some really good things.
Are you saying that Apple should unquestionably comply? Well, I don't think so, because I don't think there is convincing argument that the phone contains information to help the FBI in any way. This is an excellent excellent example of the FBI going father than anything reasonable, rebuffed by smart citizen holding their ground. While I might accept other opinions, it is therefore far from "unquestionable".
Lesson Learned Running a Side Project for One Month
Regarding the expectation that it would have gone 5-0 or 4-1 to either one, you'd have to have equally predicted a similarly one-sided result in the Deep Blue v Kasparov match. Rate of improvement might end up being completely domain-dependent, and hard to predict a-priori how it will turn out.
On the other hand, from a non-german speaker perspective, German is, for lack of a better word, aggressive. Cursing in German sounds definitely more meaningful than cursing in, say, Italian.

A couple of months back, a bank failed in Italy. On a news piece, a lady was cursing (really cursing) at bank owners. It was one of the most aggressive speeches I've seen. Yet, if you listened to the "music" alone, it was an incredibly sweet speech.
Jigsaw will not let you do it in a vanilla configuration, but does allow for layers which do enable this. There is recognition that a single program should not hit this scenario but that app servers and similar may need to support it.
As a German I do know about what the Stasi did. The thing is that most Germans don't acknowledge the relationship between what was going on then and what is going on now.

I don't know a single (German) person outside of tech who thinks anything they (ordinarily) do online or on their smartphone could be used against them in one way or another.
Some may complain about the government but they didn't change their habits when it comes to using their smartphone or laptop. They don't realize that, for instance, every picture they add to facebook will train algorithms that could be used for all kind of purposes.

President Gauck doesn't think it is valid to compare the Stasi and the NSA

> Gauck wehrt sich gegen Vergleich der NSA mit der Stasi

Das erklärt auch, warum er in dem Interview jeden Vergleich zwischen den Methoden der Stasi und den Aktivitäten der NSA weit zurückweist. Die Stasi habe wie jeder Geheimdienst in einer Diktatur "Krieg gegen das eigene Volk geführt". Sie habe die Bürger bespitzelt, um diese Bespitzelungen gegen die Bürger zu richten. Davon könne aktuell nicht die Rede sein. "Hier sprechen wir von einer Gefahr für die Demokratie innerhalb der Demokratie."

http://www.nzz.ch/international/nsa-forschte-merkel-umfassen...

And Chanchelor Merkel declared data the "raw material of the 21th century"
and urged Germans to rethink their position on privacy

> Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel hat Daten als "Rohstoffe des 21. Jahrhunderts" bezeichnet. "Hier müssen wir jetzt aufpassen, dass der Datenschutz nicht die Oberhand über die wirtschaftliche Verarbeitung gewinnt", sagte die CDU-Politikern am Montag in Berlin beim Verlegerkongress Publishers' Summit.

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Merkel-Daten-sind-Roh...

Both, Merkel and Gauck, grew up in the GDR!
Everyone Likes Nutella Nutella but No One Know This About Nutella
There must be some limit because the number of the possible moves is finite. How many handicap stones the current professionals are from that limit... who knows. Apparently AlphaGo could set a better lower limit but it should play with many more pros, and start giving handicap if needed.

I wonder if Google will make it available to pros outside these official matches. It's not that Deep Blue played so much after winning with Kasparov in 1997, right? Kasparov asked a rematch and IBM refused. Deep Blue never played again.

Our computers are stronger than it now, mainly thanks to advances in the algorithms. Deep Blue used to crunch many more positions per second than the current chess engines do on standard PC. Still they're stronger. AlphaGo is running on 1920 CPUs and 280 GPUs, so either research trims down its algorithms or we wait for CPUs with 1024 cores. But at the current size they won't fit below the keyboard of a laptop :-)
Yes, but would it be playable without a mouse and keyboard?
Hey please shoot me an email if your interested in any paid work, thanks
That's a good example.

The closest I can think of is "Tüftler", but that really doesn't capture the science-y aspect and is more hands-on. More the guy building a fusion reactor in his garage, less the group designing a radar device in some government lab.
I think accurate compile time checking of cross module class visibility is a very valuable new feature.
> It just seems like Swift is probably already taking advantage of its optimizations.

The Go compiler performs nowhere near the level of optimization that LLVM does; LLVM is years and years ahead. However, LLVM is fundamentally a C compiler and so there can be impedance mismatch between Swift and LLVM. Hence SIL. This is what you're seeing, and once the gap is closed then Swift will reap the benefits of the hundreds of optimizations in LLVM.
> *All the laptops mentioned in the article as shipping with Linux from Dell will in fact come with Intel WiFi.

Source? I see no indication of that (here is where they link to for the XPS 15: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/01/dell-xps-15-review-a-...)