skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You do you. For me, I've always considered news to be a thing to consume responsibly with the full knowledge it is a profession as well as a service.

I see no reason to retreat into a bubble because the news isn't happy. The things that nearly drove me to self-harm were real people, not an overcooked headline.
Amazing work. Hector Martin (@marcan42) is an incredibly talented hacker. I still remember his post for enabling the hardware virtualization of the CPU in his laptop, an Acer Aspire 5930 [1], that had it disabled in the BIOS, and it was not user serviceable (I had a similar laptop, with smaller screen, so his post was useful for me). Also his hacks and comments in a Spanish forum [2] for the PS2, Nintendo consoles, and others were plenty insightful. Then the PS3 hack. And now, getting Linux working in the PS4, even with 3D acceleration (without help, just with few specs found in the web (!!!)). It is mind blowing :-)

[1] https://marcan.st/2009/06/enabling-intel-vt-on-the-aspire-89...

[2] https://www.elotrolado.net
Veteran Spy Gave FBI Info Alleging a Russian Operation to Cultivate Donald Trump
Yes, that capability was restored in Android Nougat. For example, see these Chrome permissions: http://i.imgur.com/D4jYrjP.png
I remember articles about the massive racks of PS3s in Linux clusters for people who wanted to use Cell for large parallel computing.

Did Sony/IBM every actually release viable/affordable Cell hardware outside of the PS3, or is Cell pretty much dead now?
> I see a lot of senior engineers who frequently ask for clarifications – I think when you’re more confident in your skills, this gets easier.

> The more I do this, the more comfortable I feel asking someone to clarify. in fact, if someone doesn’t ask me for clarifications when I’m explaining something, I worry that they’re not really listening!

I think this is really powerful. I believe high skilled professionals tend to have a clear idea of they know and what they don't know.
If any were curious, PS3 used to support linux: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Sony-Linux-PS3-Firmware-Upd...
It isn't easily solvable for young students, but for high school age kids it is. You can increase course offerings through some sort of in-school distance learning. The last 2 years, when kids are generally 16-18 could sometimes go away to school.

Of course, all of this requires some investment and planning. The political fix would be to buss the students to far-flung schools.
Paul Vixie jokes that he's the #1 cause of CVEs, thanks to bind. Lists like this don't have enough personal responsibility in them.
Btw, if you want your keyboard lights to blink whenever my server receives an HTTP request, you can do that like so:

go install github.com/lelandbatey/watchserver/...
sudo watchclient --host lelandbatey.com

You have to run sudo for that binary to function correctly, since the syscall to light up keyboard buttons requires root.
No reasonable person here would regard "everyone" to include e.g. Sally in accounting. Psuedo code is obviously for people who write code.
Elixir has brought some interesting dynamics into the mix. Although the ErlangVM's time handling is a bit rudimentary to me. What are these refs/agents/atoms you mention?
LA homeowner here. Short answer is: not entirely true, as written.

The situation is that a vast expanse of the (very large) city of LA, and key enclaves like West Hollywood and Santa Monica (not formally part of LA, but surrounded by it) has had large and steady price increases for the past ~60 months straight. Renters have been priced out of one neighborhood after another.

It has caused a huge upheaval as people who had not noticed the pace of change have had to move to distant neighborhoods, or out of the area entirely. You see a lot more homeless, and there is a political struggle about people living in mobile homes parked at the edges of parks, etc. This upheaval is a hot issue.

But (coming to the point) it is still, barely, possible for middle class people to find homes in LA city. But you have to pay a lot more (say, 400k), and/or accept some living conditions that are marginal. When middle class Anglo families are seriously considering moving to Boyle Heights condos...it's a new thing.

I don't have time just now, but looking at real estate listings for Cypress Park might be informative. This is a tough neighborhood with significant long standing gang activity. Not South LA (aka "south central"), but close.
Example: https://www.redfin.com/CA/Los-Angeles/3608-Arroyo-Seco-Ave-9... (sold for 360k last year).
Most don't get rich on IPOs.
Artificial Life – Dave Ackley (full version) [video]
MARS: Replicating Petabytes Over Long Distances [pdf]
UTorrent Pro 3.4.9 Build 43085 with Crack [Latest]
We need to protect children from the desires of their badly-educated parents.

Large populations of people believe all kinds of crazy stuff that most of us prefer not to help propagate with our tax dollars.
Get better at writing every day with WritingFlow
This talk is hilarious and amazing. The PS4 hard drive plugs in over USB? The Southbridge is an ARM SoC? All the PCI devices are mapped into a single glue device? WTF?!

So what's more insane, the PS4 or the hacked together manufacture kernels and binary blobs on Android phones?
I tend to kindly disagree - while what you say is true for the people who love to write and receive postcards - this service is perfect for lazy people like me. The real postcard lovers will still want to buy the real thing and hand-write the message on there and probably wouldn't consider this kind of service either way.
"Stuff yourself with as much food as possible when it's available" used to be a good habit.
Apple are supposed to be the paragon of industrial design, but their mice tend to fall prey to style over substance. Their mice designs look lovely, but there's no ergonomic rationale behind their shape. If you think that the Magic Mouse is satisfactory, I'd suggest trying some genuinely high quality third-party mice - the Logitech Marathon or MX Master, or anything by Mionix or Zowie. I think you'll be shocked at the difference.

Gaming is the extreme case for mouse use, but it's not an edge case. A good gaming mouse is simply a good mouse - not a puck that you push around the desk, but an extension of your hand with a sensor underneath. eSports gamers simply demand an excellent sensor and high-quality switches in an ergonomic package.

https://mionix.net/mice
http://zowie.benq.com/en/product/mouse.html
I bought Affinity Designer for Windows on impulse (at $30 I was happy enough to swap a night out for a TV dinner), and I was impressed enough that I bought Photo sight unseen the day it came out for Windows. Within about two weeks they'd eliminated about 90% of my need for Photoshop (only a few particularly plugin-heavy workflows are left) and all of my need for Illustrator.

The only Adobe product I keep around is InDesign, and only because I was fortunate enough to get CS6 before permanent licensing ended. Affinity Publisher seems to forever be at least a year out and no alternative I've tried can do everything I need InDesign to do, much less with the same efficiency.
All time is an interesting look. At 11 vulnerabilities per product, Microsoft is much much better than Apple or Google. I have to revise some unfair and unwarranted opinions.
Linux kernel prink statements
Security at the End of 2016
There's a port of Erlang that runs on the JVM [1]. If you've got a lot of code in Erlang it could be beneficial. The language would the same, and you can choose VMs suited for a specific tasks. Or I'd like trying to use Elixir and Julia, probably over 0MQ or similar.

1: https://github.com/trifork/erjang
Video recording on yt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sq9chzNVoXg
I'm sorry, can you clarify your point? What is the problem with the idea that difficult tasks (both mental and physical) help to prevent atrophy in a certain part of the brain?
Exactly, which is about as common as nonstop paging on a Unix system, and as sensible as a criticism.
How did you come to that conclusion? I'm just saying let's call a spade a spade.

That said I think gambling is a regressive social problem and tax that should be restricted to people that can afford to waste the money or time.
So, I was curious what the Google vulnerabilities are, and it looks like quite a few of them at notes as "On Samsung S3 through S5 devices..." which seems to indicate it's not an Android problem, but a Samsung extensions to Android problem.

It's interesting, because depending on why you're looking, you might want those combined and you might want those separated. If you are interested in an Android phone, you are interested in the vulnerabilities from Google's software that apply, as well as the vulnerabilities of the phone provider if them are extending Android. If you are buying a Nexus or Pixel device, you don't care about Samsung or HTC vulnerabilities. If you just want to know about problems in Google's suite of web applications, you don't necessarily care about Android at all.

Similarly, for Apple you might want to know the track record of their phones, or you might want to know about their OS's. For windows, you might want to know about base OS vulnerabilities, or phone vulnerabilities, or Office and other application vulnerabilities.

For large companies, attributing all vulnerabilities to the company may not be the most useful way to do this. Also, if you want to know how responsible a company is, it might be more useful to provide a vulnerabilities to employed software engineers per company ratio. If company X has 10 vulnerabilities and 10 programmers, and company Y has 100 vulnerabilities but 10,000 programmers, company Y may look worse on a pure vulnerability level, but conceivably they could be doing a really good job at writing secure software, but they are just putting out a lot more software.
It doesn't take a genius to enable a CSR (CPU Specific Register), intel has the documentation online.
If framed properly (ie. this isn't Amazon quality, buyer beware!) this would be the single most exciting advance in commerce for myself.

99% of the friction of me selling used stuff I don't want or new stuff I produce is the shipping and money handling logistics.

I can't do Craigslist/Kijiji. I'm socially awkward and would rather throw away item X than risk the possibility of an awkward situation where someone's messing with me or trying to barter the price down, etc.
http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/http://www.joshbarczak.co...
How does an IQ test evaluate whether a person will work hard, follow best practices, connect with their students, etc?
> This means that pleasant puzzles like Sudoku are not enough to provide the benefits of superaging. Neither are the popular diversions of various “brain game” websites. You must expend enough effort that you feel some “yuck.” Do it till it hurts, and then a bit more.

This sounds a lot like software development. We are constantly on the edge of frustration.

Working on a complex problem can be at the same time exhausting and satisfying.

Is this not a perfect example?
keep hn, i quit, ill go to lurking as you please.

please can you delete my account and all my comments. also, you need to reconsider your life, or just take it, easy either way.

that "we" thing, those voices in your head are not real people.

oh, and tell your mum i want my belt back.
Having suffered severely from impostor syndrome for a few years, I caught myself asking a lot of really useless advanced questions that made me feel/look smart, and ignore the simpler but useful questions.

I was afraid that I would spill the beans on being a fraud who had no idea what he was doing, so I'd pretend that of course we'll use library X to write algorithm Y, but then bring up unnecessary complexity about implementation details.

One significant transition I made as I started to feel valuable and deserving of my position was to stop asking stupid questions and start asking simple questions.
I am apparently terrible at recognizing humor...

This is quite embarrassing... the microtransactions should have given it away.
I don't know enough about these topics to give you a worthy response, so I'm going to do some more research in the near future. Thank you for responding.
I've been playing with openai universe. I would be shit scared by the algorithm that achieves super human ability. With nvidias super computers, big labelled datasets and better algos, it's really hard to grasp what the big player and govt is capable of.
This is why console development is expensive.

You have to rent your dev kit and you pay per update. This ensures the hardware is "below cost"
"hard to invalidate" doesn't really capture the nature of the architectural harm.
Here's the recording:

https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8151-dissecting_modern_3g_4g_cel...

(I prefer media.ccc.de over YouTube because it lets you download the video in at least a couple of formats, and sometimes offers alternate streams/languages.)
F. Ross Johnson, Former CEO of RJR Nabisco, Dies at 85
Because although it sounds like something that would make sense, the science does not actually support that conclusion.

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/does-brain-training-work/

The tl;dr is that brain training makes you better at that one particular task. Whether that carries over to anything else is unknown. It is considered a useful technique only insofar as that it is easy to do, and we don't have a lot of other options to try anyway. But actual, measured benefits are difficult to find.

I am not against it as a concept. But much more research needs to be done to see if it has any actual value beyond the simple joy of doing such things.
What exactly is it that will distinguish this new open console from a PC? Unless there's a big difference, your platform is going to have the same drawbacks for game developers that a PC has (vastly easier piracy) without the advantages (many people already own one). Similarly users will lose out on the ability to run their normal programs on the same hardware, for the privilege of having access to less games.
A million isn't what it used to be.
How is Affinity Photo's RAW support for new devices? The supported camera list link from their website[1] says 08 February 2015. I'm not familiar with their forum so am not sure if it's ever edited since that date, but there are certain new-ish cameras missing from the list. If they don't update RAW support for new cameras, that will be a big bummer. (Lr standalone version at least updates RAW support frequently)

[1] https://affinity.serif.com/forum/index.php?/topic/4630-suppo...
The Internet of Things will continue to be a tire fire.
It's partly because the underground is 154 years old, which carries with it its own set of maintenance headaches, partly because of the "public private partnership" programs from 2000s onwards that were set up as a means to extract money from the system and partly because they pay reasonably good wages.
News companies profiteer on polarizing the population by inciting hate and fear. It's advertisement based entertainment like Jerry Springer. As long as you realize that's what "news" is for 90% of the population then indulge away.
I get bandwidth as part of the whole package at both facilities I use:

Full rack at HE (Fremont) @ 10 Mbps: $900
1/4 rack at Datacate (Sacramento) @ 10 Mbps: $350
Nice. I often forget just how much is happening in the blender world, it's come so far over the years. I know version numbers change but I remember when there was a hope that maybe by v3 there'd be a raytracer.

There were some worrying times but the community "buying" of blender marked a huge change, and it's great to see that the community is still thriving.

I had originally intended to go into 3d modelling, but the python scripting side of blender was what got me into programming. I still think having something visual is a great way of learning to program. Errors are either often very obvious or at least amusing.

So blender stopped me from pursuing 3D art as a career, but in a good way :)
Thank you. It is good but can't replace Lightroom. However, there are ways to go around it and I am thinking it through. I can leave one Mac or do dual boot for Win for Lightroom and few games I can't have on Linux.

Again, thank you for reference.
Make 2017 a Year of Failure
Also from this week :

"Previous studies have found that a person's lutein status is linked to cognitive performance across the lifespan"

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/12/161213113142.h...
http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/my-sandbox.html
what a bargain
please take your life somewhere else.
This was a fascinating essay.

Learning about the parallel array memory model, I immediately thought of its appropriateness for machine learning. I've just recently started working with TensorFlow, and the syntax for memory allocation suggests that the values operated upon during a session are in parallel arrays. Of course TensorFlow is in Python, which would suggest a graph model, but it appears as if a parallel array memory model has been grafted onto a graph model.

Does anyone know if this is correct? And if so, is this memory allocated upon session start?
Roger was a friend of mine though we didn't start that way.

I was a young annoying engineer at Sun, I worked upstairs in building 5, Roger worked downstairs. I met him because I had a /proc question. Being the sort of jerk that I was at the time, I just walked in and sat on the edge of his desk. I had never met him before.

He ignored me. For about 5 minutes, he was coding and he didn't even look up.

Finally, again without looking up, he said "what do you want?"

"I've got a question about /proc".

"And why should I answer that?"

"Because I'm going sit on your desk and belch and fart until you do".

He burst into laughter and said something like "OK, you win".

We're friends from that time forward.

I've shared some fun times with Roger, we had a nerds thanksgiving where a handful of Sun people who didn't have girlfriends all got together and had a great time.

I'll miss him, he was a great guy. RIP Roger.

P.S. All the comments about his protection of all things Unix are spot on. He was not a Linux fan, that's putting it mildly.
This is a poor justification for user subjugating software.
I'm curious if proponents of 'immortality' do not fear a world where there are tremendous social (not to mention environmental) consequences to significantly extended life/health-spans?

If you are under a certain age in any country (say <30) do you not feel like you live in a world ruled by the conservatism and culture of an older generation? These prior generations have the head start to protect their status quo. Imagining every generation persisting on top of another, all sorts of strange and dark likelihoods fill my imagination.

Most peoples' formative life views develop in a certain brief segment of their lives, from which their subsequent experiences simply reinforce. It's sadly a rare few that continually adapt and evolve their views with an open mind. A population of 7 billion+ immortals where the vast majority are set in their ways is terrifying, and being born into such an oppressive world would fill me with dread.
I think the current generation is more in line with compute costs to the point that this wouldn't make too much sense
why should one be confident that formal logic could emerge from an ANN?

It's closer to a gut feeling than anything. I believe if fairly strongly, but I haven't done any research in terms of trying to prove the point one way or the other. Don't read too much into it... it's just something I think. I may well be wrong.
Then how are workers supposed to win better terms from their capitalist employers, outside of collective bargaining or state intervention? Is a football player being infantilized when he joins a union -- because he ought to be able to negotiate contracts by himself? When a union helps him extract a more equitable share of the profits, is he being infantilized, or is he being smart?

You're free to frame this argument in terms of individual rights or "economic competitiveness" or state paternalism. Unfortunately it amounts to little more than economic handwaving. At worst it's a disingenuous ploy to undermine the interests of the labour class, deluding workers into thinking you're giving them economic rights and freedoms ("you should be able to choose when you work!") when really you're just justifying your extraction of an even bigger share of their labour.

The common labourer has no economic power. The state, the firm, and (to a diminishing extent) unions do. I hate paternalistic states (and unions) as much as you do, but when you place no limit on firms' ability to extract labour from their workers, you end up in twisted situations where people are being paid sub-livable wages and expected to be on call 24 hours. Not because it's an economic "inevitability" (child labour inevitable? You seriously believe that?), but because it's the most amenable socioeconomic arrangement for the capitalist class.
I don't think I'm "squeezing by". There's a lot of fat I'd need to trim for there to be any "squeezing".

A family is definitely more costly than a single person, and may be more difficult. But the article defines middle class as $50-$125k / year. With a $125k salary, you could afford 3 people living like me (including each having their own apartment). So I think the article is a bit extreme. On $50k, it'd be harder, but definitely do-able with some effort.
USB HDD: a cost saving measure: they already have a usb bus, why add sata on as well? we're talking a platform that's going to last for a decade possibly...

arm soc southbridge also not a surprise, xbox one has something similar. enables the console's rest mode to be "smart"
I am going to take the opposing view here on the likelihood of extraterrestrial life. But I do want to say that I think it is good someone is out there looking for it. I have been known to be wrong quite a bit.

I don't think 10^22 is a very big number. If we try to guess the probability of life evolving at random, I can see it being negligible given that number of planets.

First we can try to calculate something easier, the famous monkeys banging on keyboards to try to type Hamlet. If we put 1 trillion monkeys on each planet, and let them try for a trillion years, with three attempts per day to make the math easier, we get a total of 10^49 attempts.

We'll consider a keyboard with 50 keys. 10^49 is roughly 50^29, which means we can expect one lucky monkey to get 29 characters into the play. That is impressive but not very far into a play with 30,557 words (150,000 characters?). (http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/plays_numwo...)

Now consider human DNA. I am not a biology expert so I may not have my DNA right. But it looks like a typical human DNA molecule contains 500,000 to 2,500,000 nucleotides (http://wow-really.blogspot.com/2006/11/your-dna-would-reach-...). I believe there are 4 possibilities for each nulceotide. That means 4^2,500,000 or 10^1,500,000. That is a lot of possibilities. Worse even then typing Hamlet. And that would be if we just had monkeys supplied with adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine putting DNA together. Never mind that these are each complicated molecules in themselves that have to be assembled at random.

So how did we even get here? Well, thanks to quantum mechanics we have almost endless opportunities to end up here. It just seems unlikely that we and some other life ended up in the universe together.
In my case, they don't have publicly accessible email servers* - I have to run a VPN client. That client ensures all of the security policies are met before allowing me to connect. It's the same on my laptop and iPad.

* POP/IMAP/webmail/etc. Obviously the incomming SMTP server is publicly accessible, but that doesn't help me.