skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'd be surprised if 16bit support uses a noticeable amount of power in a running system.

For 16 bit you have to strongly distinguish between 16 bit real mode (what DOS ran on by default), 16 bit protected mode (what Windows 3.x and partly Windows 95 ran on) and Virtual 8086 mode (which was for example used under Windows 95 to run DOS applications). Also I think SMM (System Management Mode) also runs 16 bit code.

Next: In 32 bit mode, nearly every instruction can be prefixed by 0x67 (I am aware that some instructions use an 0x66 prefix instead - I just want to keep things simple here) that allows one to use 16 bit (protected mode) addressing to be used in 32 bit mode. Except for some very obscure applications that surely does not make sense, but shows how deeply ingrained 16 bit support is in the x86 instruction set. Also: If you prepend an 0x66 prefix to many classic x86 instructions in 32 bit mode, they will do what the instruction would do in 16 bit mode (except for using 32 bit adressing if suitable; but I just explained how this can be changed, too). This is exactly how instructions that use 16 bit registers are encoded.

So 16 bit support is deeply ingrained into x86 and cannot be simply removed. And I would bet there exist customers who would be really enraged if Intel or AMD did just remove some of the 16 bit modes, because they have some exotic application that depends on them.
I’ve UEFI booted Ubuntu from a Linux soft raid without issues. Everything just worked.

Don’t quote me on it, but I’m pretty sure that was Ubuntu 14.04.
I don't think it necessarily is. I know you're saying this because a language or library from a big company is likely to be dropped, but occasionally one will last a long time like Sun's Java. Just because it originates from an individual like PHP did doesn't mean for sure that it will continue to exist a long time and you'll be able to hire people.
Review your contracts with the help of a lawyer.
I wonder if Linux machines would start getting more traction then, as everyone wouldn't just have the excuse that they might as well buy a Windows machine and then get to use either Windows or Linux if they want.

Post-2020 a greater number of people may actually be forced to choose Linux. I'd rather we weren't forced to validate this theory of mine, but I'm cautiously optimistic about it.
They all timing ticking bomb, since most (all by now) are nuclear reactor propelled.

As we all know, if something can break, it will break eventually. Its only a matter of time when one of these creatures sink to the bottom and pressure will take care of the rest, causing world panic due to nuclear material getting released into the ocean.
Can you explain this any further?

I am also inclined to believe Kaspersky is in the wrong here, especially given the publicizing of personal data from a customer's computer for PR purposes, but I am having trouble understanding how the Espionage Act applies?
Not that I disagree, but you realize that point about ME & PSP (which are separate controllers not part of the main boot CPU) isn't particularly relevant to the linked article, which is about removing the 16 bit BIOS boot path from future firmware? By the time you're running real mode IBM PC boot code, the ME & PSP have long since come alive and sorted things out for boot configuration.
There isn't much reason to do so. Additional resources needed to support 16bit modes probably does not exceed few hundred transistors of logic and bunch of words of microcode. The data path is completely same, there are only few control differences (loads to selector registers set offset=value<<4; limit=0xffff; size=16bit instead of consulting descriptor tables).

On the other x86_64 CPU can be significantly simplified by riping out both 16bit and 32bit modes and thus all the selector/descriptor segmentation logic and replacing IDT with something simpler and less general.
The words of a true detective.

Like there’s nothing else in the giant mess which is the x86 architecture which can’t break.
The real advantage to cutting legacy is that it frees up engineers to work on the right problems - current and future needs - instead of verifying that the long tail of ancient stuff still works on every new thing built.

What reason is there for legacy support in the hardware and OS when we have all sorts of emulation options already?
Come on: that’s easily fixable if the provider cares: just assign an ID to every mutation operation. Never repeat the operation if called again.

In the real world even bigger players such as AdWords would time out on our bulk requests to them if making >100M changes, without giving any errors back (the jobs just simply tend to disappear; or the jobs never get submitted in the first place).

Truth is, you may or may not be discussing the appeal of the REST; but the issue in this context is solved already - and it’s only a matter of professionalism and therefore, the resources required to build something that just works.

But in the real world we get stoned students writing the majority of the APIs; having read a few how-to’s.
How I started.

I was getting paid to make websites at 12...there's a huge chasm of difference between that and the web development I do now though.
Some time ago I implemented a library [1] similar to this tool. The tricky part is that derivatives quickly exceed 2 dimensions, e.g. derivative of a vector output w.r.t. input matrix is a 3D tensor (e.g. if `y = f(X)`, you need to find derivative of each `y[i]` w.r.t. each `X[m,n]`), and we don't have a notation for it. Also, often such tensors are very sparse (e.g. for element-wise `log()` derivative is a matrix where only the main diagonal has non-zero values corresponding to derivatives `dy[i]/dx[i]` where `y = log(x)`).

The way I dealt with it is to first translate vectorized expression to so-called Einstein notation [2] - indexed expression with implicit sums over repeated indices. E.g. matrix product `Z = X * Y` may be written in it as:

Z[i,j] = X[i,k] * Y[k,j] # implicitly sum over k

It worked pretty well and I was able to get results in Einstein notation for element-wise functions, matrix multiplication and even convolutions.

Unfortunately, the only way to calculate such expressions efficiently is to convert them back to vectorized notation, and it's not always possible (e.g. because of sparse structure) and very error-prone.

The good news is that if the result of the whole expression is a scalar, all the derivatives will have the same number of dimensions as corresponding inputs. E.g. in:

y = sum(W * X + b)

if `W` is a matrix, then `dy/dW` is also a matrix (without sum it would be a 3D tensor). This is the reason why backpropogation algorithm (and symbolic/automatic differentiation in general) in machine learning works. So finally I ended up with a another library [3], which can only deal with scalar outputs, but is much more stable.

Theoretical description of the method for the first library can be found in [4] (page 1338-1343, caution - 76M) while the set of rule I've derived is in [5].

[1]: https://github.com/dfdx/XDiff.jl

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_notation

[3]: https://github.com/dfdx/XGrad.jl

[4]: http://docs.mipro-proceedings.com/proceedings/mipro_2017_pro...

[5]: https://github.com/dfdx/XDiff.jl/blob/master/src/trules.jl
These people are all skilled programmers doing high speed analytics. They aren’t doing it for the money.
Wasn't the previous backlash what got Microsoft to allow Verisign and others to make Secure Boot keys, too? Wasn't it originally only Microsoft the one that could do that, and it's why everyone freaked out that they may act their usual monopolistic-self and deny Linux distros the keys?
I thought about making the title something like that, but I didn't want it to seem as if the author should be maligned for not having it finished yet and I felt that it would have that connotation. I thought the title as written would be more neutral in that respect.

I personally consider NoScript an absolute must for security reasons, so I am not updating most of my machines until it is available. I thought that would be newsworthy for other people who have a similar mindset.
> So does uefi support multi boot or not?

UEFI was pretty much designed to solve the multi boot issue in a clean way where different OSes don’t step on each other’s toes and creates issues.

This has worked fine from day one, even from a single physical volume.
I love FF57 performance, but I'm having a hard time without Vimperator.
The Ohio-class submarines of the US Navy date back to 1981, and their replacement isn't due until 2029 (and probably won't happen until later than that).

The Taiwanese are still operating a submarine which was launched in 1944.

So yeah, a 30-year-old submarine is merely middle-aged. On the other hand, Argentinian maintenance standards are not exactly the envy of the world (cf http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/01/23/argentine-destroyer-... )
Incumbent business interests colluding with government under the guise of “public safety” to enact regulation and licensing just to build artificial moats and protect themselves from competition is such fiendish invisible form of corruption.

Planet money did a very good and very despressing episode on one woman’s quest to open a hair braiding salon.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/06/22/155596305/epis...
Changing the world is great! Just don't expect to use someone else's money if it's not likely to be profitable.
Because you don't own them. Because you never actually owned them. You've never been told how your chipset works, or how your CPUs transpiler works, or what that extra chip that has system level access above ring 0 does, how to modify it, or how to disable it until people randomly found the magic bit to turn it off.

You don't know what your hard drive firmware does or how secure it actually is. You don't know what the controllers on your RAM sticks are doing. You have no way to find out, either, because its all proprietary.

It doesn't even matter that you are not really able to modify the firmware on RAM or in a hard drive, and that it takes way more work than almost any individual is capable of to actually even try to verify the firmware on any of these devices regardless of if you have the purported source code or not.

Its all magic, its all black boxes, and you have no control over any of it, which is why companies regularly volunteer just going one step further all the time - they already have power over your hardware, what is a bit more amidst everything else being an obscured secret?
Wayback Machine allows browsing website history by year. Press year, instead of arrows:

— The New York Times: http://web.archive.org/web/19961112181513/http://www.nytimes...

— WaPo: http://web.archive.org/web/19961220172326/http://www.washing...

— Financial Times: http://web.archive.org/web/19970607125328/http://www.ft.com:...
I know. It was a segue to a point about cetacean evolution. Like great apes, they're pretty recent innovations.
A quick google search shows that Linux has between 3% and 7% of the desktop marketshare. It seems like an unwise business decision to make AMD the only possible choice for 5% of heavy purchasers, who also help with server purchasing decisions at IT jobs.
Nine nuclear submarines have already sank:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sunken_nuclear_submari...

There hasn't been any world panic. There's lots of reasons to dislike the war-machine. (I myself am a former nuclear naval officer turned conscientious objector/pacifist.) But FUD does not help the case against militarism.
Angular is actually part of the Ads team at Google which is also it's biggest user, since AdsWords is written in Angular.
uMatrix felt like a lot of work. But I finally took the plunge and I love it. It is insightful how different websites are pieced together.
until you consider the weight of the solar panel
I don't mind people having opinions. I mind people denouncing everything that competes with their personal preference. Note how I said "hostility".

I'm talking about comments like

"God this is horrible. It's ugly. Hard to read."

"ugly piece of code"

"React failed miserably"

"The JS ecosystem is like the baskin robbins of st"

and so on.
I'd like to see some of these singletons balance a family and successful technical career at the same time.

That takes a lot of work. Investors discount a person because he has a family due to some perception that therefore he or she won't work as hard on the company are either ignorant or unforgivably stupid.
When will it come to Car Play?
One thing I've always appreciated about the BBC website is that the old articles are still in the old style of the time. For example: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3559050.stm or http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/574132.stm (there might be a way to reliably find more examples, I'm not sure).

I'm not sure whether this is by design or if the content was too tightly coupled to the style to migrate, but I like it. I think in the relevant RFCs it says that a URL should always point to the same thing, so it's good that they don't try to update them.
> but I don't buy the narrative that Kaspersky is some evil Russian cyber hoover.

I don't think it even needs a narrative about Kaspersky. You could expect that they're infiltrated in some way (worker, infrastructure, hosting, ...) and leak information to FSB. I'm exactly the same way Symantec could leak information to NSA. Without the evil qualifier and narrative for the reasons, both are likely to happen to some extent.
In addition to what has been mentioned already (esp. backwards-compatibility):

* Ability to customize / extend

I'm assuming your API is targeted at a business domain (vs. an infrastructure API like an email API). The API vendor will do his best to cover all major use cases within that business domain. But expect that your project has a minor use case, or is the first project to ever need feature X. The vendor most likely won't want to implement this feature. (This isn't necessarily bad - in fact it is good, if the vendor would add any random feature to his API, it would evolve into a frankenstein that is a nightmare to work with)

However, the vendor should have features and patterns/best-practices on how to solve those cases. E.g. in addition to the API vendors data model, you should be able to add your own data (like https://stripe.com/docs/api#metadata) and you should be able to react to events to add custom behaviour (e.g. https://stripe.com/docs/webhooks).

* Quality of documentation and support

A lacking documentation, especially in combination with bad support, can slow down development significantly. Some APIs also have a good community outside of the vendor (e.g. it's active on Stackoverflow), take that into consideration as well.

Also, are the POs and Devs active in support? If yes, this is a good sign IMO, because they're trying to stay in touch with their customers. And it'll also raise the quality level of the support, because - if you run into trouble - you can escalate to someone who really knows what is going on.

* Good SDKs in your language

Some API vendors offer great SDKs. They can be a huge timesaver, e.g. if they provide models for all their endpoints, they provide additional helper methods ontop of the API, and they convert data-types into language-native objects (e.g. Money isn't a native data-type of JSON, but of most languages).
It is also valuable if the SDKs (and docs) come with lots examples in your language.

Some SDKs are okay-ish, especially if generated from Swagger/Raml. Some generated ones are a bit strange and it may be better to work directly with the API if it let's you craft your models in the way you need them to.

Some SDKs are a nightmare. We had one that leaked threads and killed our servers after a couple hours... not fun!

* Development workflow

As a dev, how can you use the API for testing? On staging? Does this incur additional costs?

You may need to reproduce a bug from your production API. It's helpful if you can copy the production data into your dev project easily.

(I'm an API dev @ commercetools)
Vanguard and Victorious were laid down in '86 and '87 and launched in '92 and '93 respectively [1], the first two of the Upholder-class subs were launched in '86 and '89 [2] and are currently with the Canadians in "active" service.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguard-class_submarine#Boats...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upholder/Victoria-class_submar...
If anyone is wondering by barbers require licenses in all 50 states, it's for both historical and public health reasons. On the historical front, barbers were previously something akin to doctors, performing a variety of tasks that we would now say are the responsibility of doctors and dentists. On the public health front, barbers deal with dangerous chemicals (hair dying), infectious diseases (lice), and tools that can be deadly if mishandled (razors). Training is necessary to minimize these risks.
Literally the second line of the article states that it is a diesel-electric submarine. There is no nuclear material on board.
fgen(1) FCode tokenizer

ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release-8/src/usr.bin/fgen/Makefile
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release-8/src/usr.bin/fgen/fgen.1
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release-8/src/usr.bin/fgen/fgen.h
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release-8/src/usr.bin/fgen/fgen.l
People stuck with Firefox because of the old, potent, extension framework.

Now they have no reason to stick with Firefox because the extension framework is just another Chrome clone, so why not switch to an actual Chrome clone?
None cares. Google sucks.
Shipping On Time > Scientific Rigor

Like everything, you have to strike a balance. If OP wants to be a slave to methodology, they should stay in academia. Engineering is literally about managing these trade-offs.

I hope they have a stomach for the politics of it.
Why do you consider a cofounder to be an adversary?
I don't want to be the person who earns less than someone else just because they have kids and i don't.

Perhaps someone decided to wait with kids because they want to have more time for the startup and/or more money left over for it.
It will be interesting to watch these two products evolve in parallel. I suspect that user experience will be the main differentiator.
> Chrome is still king of the web browsers, beating Firefox Quantum

That's one editorialized title. Hell, even the Mashable's title is less antagonistic. Can we title this thread with the actual title of the article?
Call your congress person. Show up at their office. R or D. Do it.

Right now, the CS students of Gonzaga Uni are building a website that lets you send a physical letter to your congressperson via Lob.

If you would like to help, our Repo's here: https://github.com/gu-app-club/save-the-net

Or you're welcome to DM me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/flaqueeau
Do Firefox collect everything and manipulate search results?
> There's so much to be gained from getting rid of the old extension system for concurrency, extension compatibility, and the health of the ecosystem and individual browser installations.

I personally think that while it's clearly great for security and possibly good for Firefox in general, it's also terrible for the extension ecosystem. The set of possible extensions is being reduced from "literally anything computable" to "what the API supports." Sure, (some) popular extensions are basically being grandfathered in by having APIs added just for them, but that doesn't help the extensions that aren't written yet and will now never be written.

Essentially, a major selling point of Firefox has been sacrificed in the hope that the increased security, better perf, and greater development velocity leads to greater marketshare. Well, I hope so, but I think the jury will be out on that for a while.

Other than that, Quantum seems great. I did lose all my tabs when it updated (boo - that's never happened before), and I think the whole-window-width address bar dropdown is bizarre and ugly, but other than that it's great. I suppose the only long-term concern is that default merger of the address bar and search bar - configurable options have a habit of eventually being dropped, and I think a world of omnibars is less usable and less privacy-conscious.
> several inditements already

Several felony indictments at that with some very serious charges filed.
Saka keys provides a slice of vimperators functionality, might be worth trying. It's far from vimperator but better than nothing.
I myself am a former nuclear naval officer turned conscientious objector/pacifist.

This is tangential, but can I ask about some of your experiences or reasons for that? It sounds interesting.

Only curious. Feel free to shoot me an email if you'd like.
Sure, there is some mention of "!oss". It's not 100% clear though. I sure missed it.

You are redistributing transporter's source though, because it's avalaible from the github repository. Wtf are you even talking about? There is some code almost straight from transporter in your abc repository.

Sure, you've made changes. Why should anyone be interested though if it's 100% closed-sourced? "free while in beta" my ass.
Moving to Firefox 52 isn't really an option for me because it's a pig compared to 55/56 (it consumes almost 5GBs of RAM compared to 1GB for 56).
As you say, first two weren’t launched in the 1980s and the second two aren’t part of the UK fleet, so that’s still just one. Can’t really call that a majority even if you were contradicting me.
Pretty fucked up to attribute the genocide of the people of Yemen to Trump.

This is a USA policy, spanning two administrations. Obama started with bipartisan support, and Trump continues it with bipartisan support. As well as the support of Great Britain, a country backing the Saudis at least as much as the USA is..
For starters, do you not see the huge logical leap going from naming a couple of executives who are close with Putin, to saying that ALL people in Russia with money or power are doing nothing but following Putin's agenda?

What about the minor detail that the oligarchs existed not only before Putin, but before Yeltsin, his predecessor, as well (not that they didn't grow under Yeltsin, but still)?

Most documentation that even passes a smell test of being reasonably plausible also suggests that the relationship was inverted - the oligarchs had more influence over Yeltsin than he did over them. When Putin took power, he was known for getting rid of many of them. The interesting thing about that, is that can be interpreted charitably or uncharitably - reducing the level of corruption and oligarch abuse of the government would be a positive thing, but banishing those who don't get in line (where we are assuming "getting in line" means they are being asked to do bad things, not follow laws) seems to be the default assumption in Russia's case. As far as I've seen, there's really never been anything to substantiate the uncharitable narrative, but so many people who have never been to Russia or spoken to a Russian person have themselves thoroughly convinced that they understand these secret "arrangements".

The whole idea that he could be a mafia boss and the CEO of literally everything is just crazy thinking, yet many of us westerners seem to just eat it up, and anything shady that happens even close to the government is always personally attributed to Putin's orders. It'd be like calling Trump a mafia boss because some random cop took a bribe in some city in the mid west. The idea is laughable, and the fact that we got here warrants a little bit of self-reflection on our part.