skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the meltdown paper writers evidently has a sense of humor since "hunter2" [0] is one of the passwords they use in their demonstration [1]

[0] http://bash.org/?244321

[1] https://meltdownattack.com/meltdown.pdf (page 13, figure 6)
It'd probably be simpler to do this as a userstyle, since there are many extensions supporting userstyles. Still, if you prefer the WebExtension format that Chrome provides, it's worth noting you could trivially release the same extension for Firefox and Edge, since I'm sure all of the APIs this uses are compatible.
> ...you cannot seriously expect this to be a convincing argument without offering your own kosher definition (read: semantics) of "bug".

It's kind of hilarious that the only reason you can claim this is because of your selective editing. The whole statement you are responding too is this-

> In this specific case the argument is being made that Intel is trying to use a different meaning for the word "bug" that favors them. redcalx is then stating the general definition of "bug" in an attempt to point out how limiting and nonstandard their definition is.

Since you missed it the first time redcalx is already making the argument for me. I don't need to supply a separate version of the definition, I just need you to read the original message you were responding too.
I think this position is incredibly susceptible to collapse from its own argument.

> "people can rise where others won't"

Why do they rise? Are they in control over these reasons at all, or is that luck too? This brings up central questions of free will and influence of external sources. As a hard determinist, I'd argue it's all entirely luck to the core.

You're going to have a hard time drawing a line between luck and free will that people will ever agree on for the foreseeable future.

> "Inequality is inevitable, it is natural, and its fair"

Inevitable? I'd agree. Natural? In so much that it is the way of nature, yes. But nature isn't inherently good, it simply is.

Fair? Doesn't seem like it is at all to me. Now we have to go neck deep into a discussion on the definition of fairness (please let's not actually here).

> "Saying that luck is unfair is in my opinion a useless and even evil idea, it can be used to justify terrible acts."

What acts are you referring to? I suspect that these terrible acts rely on far more interpretation beyond "luck is unfair". Those interpretations having flaws does not make this particular idea evil.
> Second a gender ration of 1 male to 50 females is obscene. Tech is supposedly incredibly sexist for having a gender ratio of less than 2 to 1.

Teaching, especially pre-K teaching, has long been held out as an extreme examples as a field extremely effected by unequal social gender roles, and one where that distortion is particularly socially harmful. And Google is pretty much dead average for pre-K teaching with this ratio.
"Fair" does not mean "increases entropy" in this context. We can split hairs about what exactly "fair" is supposed to be, it's probably central to this whole nebulous disagreement, but a lowest common denominator would be something like "has higher value than opportunity cost". This may even increase entropy in aggregate. A fair die does not make a fair game.
It's not essential; I know plenty of people at Amazon without college degrees. But you won't make it though the interviews for an Software Development Engineer role without basic computer science knowledge. So if you didn't take data structures and algorithms in school, learn them on your own.
> Respectfully, do you really believe that?

I have no knowledge of how these salaries are set. It's possible they're decided individually, because these jobs are rather different than most others at Google.

In that case, I could imagine the people in charge of the daycare facilities trying to attract more men and (possibly without much active thought) making higher offers to them.
Why are there many restaurants often one next to each other? Why can't people get their money together and hire the absolute best chef in the world and build 1 huge restaurant?

That's just how it is.

Also, he's not duplicating anything, he's using LineageOS plus new stuff that will be open source.
The "anti-political" part is probably the most pertinent to modern tech thought. People repeat it here as well - the idea that any kind of specification or statistic is just cold and hard, and there are no lenses.

What I wonder more is: is it a product of the "build it" mentality like Turner says, or is it manipulated by money men with an interest is maintaining the status quo by silencing dissent as non-scientific?
More than the lawsuit, it attacks one of the core aspect of Intel's brand: performances. Intel chips are supposed to be faster. Now they are suddenly 30% slower because they carelessly implemented performance features over security ones.
Ancient Infant's DNA Reveals New Clues to How the Americas Were Peopled
> Intel believes these exploits do not have the potential to corrupt, modify or delete data.

Unless you view a key or password... then use it to corrupt, modify or delete data.
Love the little joke about the sublime text pop up.
Just an idea that I had:

If these exploits seem rely on taking precise timing measurements (on the order of nanoseconds), could we eliminate or restrict this functionality in user space?

The Spectre exploit uses the RDTSC instruction, and this can apparently be restricted to privilege level 0 by setting the TSD flag in CR4.

I know it would kind of suck, but it might be better than nothing.

I would think that most typical user applications wouldn't require that accurate of a time measurement. If they do, then maybe they can be white listed?
AMD is saying that:

!(susceptible_v1 && susceptible_v2 && susceptible_v3)

They are not saying that:

!susceptible_v1 && !susceptible_v2 && !susceptible_v3

(the latter would be rendered in English as: "AMD is not susceptible to any of the the three variants")
I'm in the never believed Musk camp, but I like people setting high goals and achieving them, even if a little late.
> ...severely round performance.now().

This sucks, and is a side-effect that I didn't even think about. I guess it's probably pretty effective, but it will make benchmarking a lot harder, since you'll probably now have to do a lot more runs.
The difference is in how the issue is phrased. You usually see people argue that the tech imbalance is in men/nerds/whoever discriminating against women and pushing them out. You usually see the school teaching problem phrased as "men don't want to work as teachers".

Those two phrasings call for completely different action.
Pretty good. A max of 100,000 Dogecoins is definitely not enough though.
"Better than CMD.exe"

High praise.
Is this site really laggy while scrolling for anyone else?

It utilizes up to 50% CPU while scrolling according to Chromium task manager.
Well, then maybe the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party shouldn't have passed it. Or maybe it's not really the case:

"German atheist runs afoul of country's rarely enforced blasphemy laws after he was fined €500 for driving around with anti-Christian slogans on his car"

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/121...
Mortality rate is a poor metric.

First, it "penalizes" doctors/hospitals that take on the most severe cases. There is no objective metric for "we saved X people who would have died at an average facility." Do you want a metric that would encourage a doctor/hospital to deny an aggressive procedure for fear of taking a hit in its mortality metrics?

Secondly, it ignores ongoing quality of life. A cardiac surgery can have a later death that does not count in its mortality rate, even if it was due to a complication caused by, or significantly contributed to, by inferior medicine.
That probably won’t work. Vitamine D production is stimulated by UVB wavelengths (270nm to 300nm). These wavelengths of light are very heavily attenuated by fiber optics (because of scattering in the fibers). Sorry.
> I believe there are just two cases:

Nope. :-)

Because in Swedish, ÅÄÖ are distinct letters of the alphabet, they are not treated different than any other vowel, they're not variants of base letters or anything like that.

I was wrong about ÄÖÜ not being part of the German alphabet. They are, but they're not letters (Buchstaben), they're umlauts. So the Swedish alphabet contains 29 letters, but the German alphabet contains 26 letter, 3 umlauts, and the Eszett.

In the end, it's all arbitrary as fuck, with tons of historical reasons for the way things are, and god help the localization engineer who thinks it's all easy peasy. :-)
You are being down-voted because the whole point of almost all GAE apps is to return data from the datastore, albeit usually in nicely formatted HTML for browsers. You simply need to provide a handler that returns your data in whatever chunks or format you want.
For every step towards browser-based apps there seems to be a step back again - e.g. React Native, Electron and Android Play on ChromeOS.

Back when the first iPhones debuted without an app store, Apple claimed that everyone could just use web apps. That didn't last long.
Semi-sensational headline makes it seem like they've known this for well over a year. It's been known for approx. 6 months.
You are wrong. Install the NoScript extension and you can see your site without js. NoScript also allows you to selectively enable js per site on a temporary or permanent basis. This is the default way that I and many other people browse the web.

https://noscript.net/
Having lived in Nagoya, Japan after growing up in America, I think industrials is one of those areas where Japanese sensibilities and approaches to innovation vs incremental improvement are going to be tough to beat. Like everything in Japan, it’s not simple. My friends who run companies that supply Toyota and Mitsubishi in auto and aerospace absolutely worship the golden age of American industry in a way that I’m not sure many Americans still do. At the same time, they’re brilliant engineers that operate at extremely high standards, and are playing to win.
> more afraid of each other than the Nazis.

That wasn't exactly irrational, the Nazis were not the first or only party in Germany to be engaging in widespread violence. The Communists, for example, were a real and actual threat. Mass street violence and assassinations were common in Weimar Germany even when the Nazis were nobodies.
Very reserved for Linus :)
That's true to first approximation in Chrome, but apparently not always.

This recent article contains a bit more detail on Site Isolation:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/12/chrome-63-offers-eve...

> Chrome's default model is, approximately, to use one process per tab. This more or less ensures that unrelated sites are kept in separate processes, but there are nuances to this set-up. Pages share a process if they are related through, for example, one opening another with JavaScript or iframes embedding (wherein one page is included as content within another page). Over the course of a single browsing session, one tab may be used to visit multiple different domains; they'll all potentially be opened within a single process. On top of this, if there are already too many Chrome processes running, Chrome will start opening new pages within existing processes, resulting in even unrelated pages sharing a process.

Which suggests there are a number of cases where multiple tabs could share a process.
Wow the gender ratio is 1 male to 50 women for teachers!

This would be a great chance for google to show the world how its done on equality, and have a google branded push for more males in teaching and more women in tech.

It would definitely show the critics of hiring more women in technology, that it really is about equality.
Got ill, had to pay for medical care :<

Doubly depressing to see this listed under “Bad Trade”. What a first world country…
Mazda has a plan for electric, they have a tech sharing agreement with Toyota. Mazda gets access to the most widely deployed electric powertrain (Priuses), and Toyota gets access to bleeding edge Mazda gasoline engines to replace their own one-gen-behind with no successor gasoline engine. Win-win for both.
Indeed. Although he did say: "... and that really means that all these mitigation patches should be
written with "not all CPU's are crap" in mind."
> That wasn't exactly irrational

Nor did I say that it was (at least, based on information available at the time; it may have been strictly irrational in rational choice terms, where rationality implies optimality based on the actual future consequences and not merely anticipated ones.)
Sorry for the late reply, but I just saw this reply. Can you share who "we" are? I'm always interested in new practical systems for concurrency.
Google software is in my opinion the best on the market in every aspect, and I would hate to stop using their Chrome, Inbox, Photos, Maps, and Keep apps.

I'm also not sure if the way Google looks like they're using information is that much worse than all the stuff people deliberately publish on Facebook.

I don't feel spied, and one is free to stop sending info at any time (unlike let's say in China or North Korea, where they have an actual problem).

Google makes my life about 1000 times easier, if the trade-off is that they use some of that info to for showing relevant ads that I block on every device (including in-app ads with AdGuard), it's fine for me right now.
everything becomes hate speech when a third party is involved and it is the third party which has to pay the fine. these companies have little choice but to err on the side of caution.

haters can spread hate with near impunity because someone else is paying the price if they don't act fast enough to remove it
Why does he mention ARM64 instead of AMD?
How is a feature you can turn off paternalistic? I’d think that argument is much stronger about iOS.
One of the things TFA mentions is installing modern switches. Of all the solutions it's seems the least difficult and disruptive.

It seems like a problem of will and not technology.

Maybe NYC subway needs some huge disruptive event to motivate people to do something. (FBI I'm not talking about that, please don't visit me!)
The problem isn't "it's not bought forward by that much relatively" in as much as you have an agreed timeline to have coordinated patches (e.g so one org doesn't push a fix before other orgs have). So if you have a bunch of orgs set up to do a release on day X, and then publish on X-[whatever] then you are effectively zero-daying.

Is it super important in this case? shrug.

But imagine for the sake of argument there was some undocumented cpu behaviour "if instruction x,y,z are executed in that order with these constants then catch fire", then having anyone pre-empt the agreed update time could be bad.
I actually don't think it's a performance thing. If we're going with anecdotes here, the few people I know who went into teaching (3 women, 1 man):

1.) Did it because they found the work extremely meaningful
2.) Were already used to living in poverty and accepted that it would continue as a professional.
3.) Knew that any future family/kids would be dependent on having a spouse that earned more than them.

I've talked to some men who considered that path, but a few told me they wouldn't pursue it because they'll need to be the breadwinner if they want a family some day, and they can't do that comfortably (without a second job) on a teacher's paycheck.

Sorta makes sense though, the men who are most talented and interested in working with children are also most likely to want children of their own. And unfortunately societal pressures do still tell men that they are responsible for providing economically, and that doing so is critical to being attractive as a partner. Hopefully that will change going forward. I know far more partnerships where a woman makes more money among my peer group than my parents know among theirs.
Browsers are pretty terrible at downloading more than a few hundred MB. They can't compare to native download managers like Steam or Blizzard's, or even wget.
nature produces the optimal animals for survival, and its not limited to the current form the animal is in. (I'll get to that later). think of this as a machine learning problem, you want to have regularization penalties from over-fitting the environment, because it will inevitably change.

the author makes some absurd comments. "There doesn't seem to be any fundamental reason why an animal couldn't evolve which makes steel, for example. It would get its raw material like we do, from iron ore."

how does the author expect our bodies to produce heat in the thousands of degrees to burn out the impurities in iron and infuse carbon in its super heated state? i dont buy their argument that our bodies can make anything just because its building stuff at the molecular level. humans survived a lot of extinction level events, a lot of global famine. even if we could do the former, we might have gone extinct if we had extraordinary dietary requirements of iron. and what ever animal we evolved from would have also had to deal with that, and they experienced even larger extinction level events.

i was thinking about why the dinosaurs had such small brains. other animals and reptiles living today existed in the same period, and they had larger brains, so I thought the dinosaur brains were small by design, why?

i think because being big was adventitious, and being egg layers, only so much air can travel through a membrane. some eggs were as large as 2 feet long, probably not a lot of air getting into the whole system, so a hulking brain is a waste. even if they had small eggs, they needed the ability to evolve / or activate genes to grow big when allowed to do so.
"Intel suffers a Meltdown" should be an apt headline for tomorrow's headlines.
I Was a Successful Journalist When a Doctor First Handed Me Opioids
This makes me feel better about my own lost opportunity
Somebody needs to tell him that the plural of CPU is "CPUs", not "CPU's" :-). I am afraid that even more people will start overusing apostrophes.
The article (and the recent Piketty book) is trying to explain exactly why it isn't fair for people to keep the wealth that they create: because it enables them and their offspring to stay wealthy at the expense of everyone else. Once you have wealth, there is no mechanism that removes it. And, this process occurs both in human society and in nature.
I liked the example of separating multiple voices.
This might actually improve performance because it would prevent actually-hot data being evicted from the cache in favour of cold data that was loaded in a not-taken speculated branch.
So is there no way to disable the performance crippling fix? If you ran an air gapped or highly controlled environment wouldn’t you want th option of disabling this to keep performance? How many Giga Terra or Exo FLops will be lost to this fix in super computers? Or is the way to disable it just not merge this patch into your custom kernel code?
>Sounds like all instance types can now be run in HVM mode (news to me, but the AWS tech in the thread made the claim)

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/virtuali...

"All instance types support HVM AMIs."

This is a recent change.

(I work at AWS, not directly involved with this change and not speaking in any sort of official capacity, but can confirm you can use HVM on m1, etc, now)
Fascist techniques won't stop it then, it will only amplify them.

The fascist kind of suppressing (usually disagreements with the establishment or status quo) speech usually ends in violence and revolution.
That can't be right because they already round performance.now() so the Spectre attack didn't use it (it instead used a webworker with a tight-loop incrementing a counter)
The way that it's presented in the article, I had assumed it was a free service to employees. The fact that it's not makes this even more frustrating!
This seems unnecessary hostile. It's quite obvious that these patches had to be completed in a hurry, and in addition to any number of similar patches for other systems. Configurability is currently useless for Intel CPUs, as all of them seem to be affected.

Depending on how their CPU development pipeline works, it's quite likely that even the next generation will still be affected, giving everyone plenty of time later for such niceties.

It's also slightly too harsh to call all of Intel's work "crap" when this bug has apparently existed for the better part of two decades without being noticed.
There does not need to be a performance hit, but cache complexity must rise: speculative execution must use a separate cache for any data that was fetched speculatively. Only when that branch is truly accepted must that data enter the "real" cache. As long as speculative execution does not go on for too long, these secondary caches can stay really tiny (a handful of cache lines maybe).
How to start with Raspberry Pi
Feels like companies is starting it's not a problem or known for a period of time, how are you coming up with approx. 6 months?
We can talk after the pre-K teaching industry gets non-stop trenchant criticism of the kind that gets levied on the tech industry (not merely suggestive articles) about their massive gender disparity.
How to use raspberry pi camera
Considering Intel is working on this for the last 6 months, it is indeed a little telling that they did not have the patch behind a feature flag. It also explains why AMD was so passive aggressive while inserting the exception for their CPUs. Seems like Intel was trying to make this some sort of act of god type of deal instead of writing out the if(intel){horrible mitigation}.
Let's try avoiding being pedants. Human language is quite squishy and imprecise anyways.
AIUI, Anders Fogh has collaborated with people at TU Graz on various occasions previously: I'd assume they already knew about his work prior to the blog post.
What is Enigma? Extending Ethereum with private and powerful smart contracts
Good comment. If more people understood the distribution of wealth was largely the result of natural laws of productivity (described by the Pareto Principle), and not just the result of corruption, exploiting externalities, etc, there would be much less resentment and envy towards the top 1%. Perhaps then we could focus on some solutions that don't make the 1% want to flee to a more free country, taking their productivity and wealth with them.
Because Intel writes almost all of the x86 arch code for Linux, so AMD gets stuck footing the bill for hardware bugs like this, even if AMD isn’t affected. From Linus’s perspective it’s the same arch, because, well, it is.
simple and elegant! handles state simply, handles JSX and seems quite vanilla. What’s more to want?
In true emergencies, your coverage works everywhere, although your insurer can request that you move to a facility in their network once you are stable.

The point of emergency care is to get you the quickest competent care. This almost always means the closest facility unless there is a specialization issue (e.g. a severe truama case may be evacuated to a Level 1 rated trauma care facility, even if that means an air ambulance).
For those who are wondering who the hell calls his software 'MatheAss': Its German and could be translated as 'Math Ace'.
Network Hacking Continued – Intermediate to Advanced
they are instructions. those instructions say compete in what ever round about way they decide on doing it. the ones that don't say compete die out.
StarSpace: Embed All the Things
Some people swear by Alcoholics Anonymous and others despise it
My favorite is espfix. espfix64 is worse than espfix32 too. I have suggested limiting modify_ldt to root instead.
Linus has a long history with, a deep understanding of, and I presume a special place in his heart for x86 microarchitectures.