skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As of right now every single CPU that does speculative execution. (I.e. runs both sides of a branch then throws away the one that didn't end up being valid.)
Build a Ripple XRP Wallet for Android and iOS with Ionic Framework
Unpaired Image-To-Image Translation Using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks
Curing someone's blindness, or cancer, or HIV, won't pay one's bills (unless the patient fronts you the $850k, that is). And by "one's bills", I mean the bills of the research team, the lab technicians, the doctors, people on the distribution pipeline, people who design, build and sell advanced machines and material that is used at every stage of drug's research and development, and people who test it all and independently ensure the new drug doesn't hurt instead of helping.

The price tag isn't so high because someone wants to get really rich off other people's suffering. It's so high, because to develop a drug, we need to employ ridiculous amounts of resources of our civilization, in labour, knowledge and material.

Until we hit post-scarcity, where all the basic needs can be fulfilled pretty much for free, money will be driving things. Those are the constraints under which we work today.
I'm not sure that masquerading as a normal human being is any kind of a bar for an AI to pass. How about, passing for an expert in a field e.g. medicine, investing, navigation? I'd much rather see my AI certified that way.
Privacy and Exposure, Gatekeepers and Privileged Consumers
...which is why AMD with just as good performance doesn’t have the same flaws.
> leveraging fundamental assumptions about high-performance CPU design.

I believe the generalized fix is to restore the entire CPU state after a mispredict. You’d either need to add an extra copy of the entire processor state (tens of megabits) for every simultaneous predict you support ($$$) or keep track of how to revert all changes and revert them one at a time ($, slow).
Yes. To clarify, I work in Cupertino, CA as well. Stock also had a nice bump too, jumped 10-20% since my vesting start date.

I was hired at one level above entry level.
The problem (in my understanding) is not with the specification of the x86 ISA, but with the implementation of the speculative execution micro-architecture and probably the memory sub-system as well. That is why Intel is so badly affected by the problem, but not AMD, despite them both implementing the same instruction set.

RISCV has already had to fix its memory consistency model, so it is not without problems. But it that is a spec bug, not an implementation bug. Whether there is an out of order, speculative execution RISCV core in the wild which suffers from this is as far as I know very unlikely. If there is, no doubt it's designers have had a busy time lately.
This is a great writeup.

This article is labelled as subscriber-only content, yet I am not a subscriber and can see it fine by following this link. Is it as simple as having the right URL to get to LWN subscriber-only content, or is there some other reason it can be accessed by non-subscribers?
Sure, if you're happy with global outages.

https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/17003 - On Monday 30 January 2017, newly created Google Compute Engine instances, Cloud VPNs and network load balancers were unavailable for a duration of 2 hours 8 minutes.

https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/16007 - On Monday, 11 April, 2016, Google Compute Engine instances in all regions lost external connectivity for a total of 18 minutes, from 19:09 to 19:27 Pacific Time.

Or, complete outages for a region:
https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/17008 - On Thursday 8 June 2017, from 08:24 to 09:26 US/Pacific Time, datacenters in the asia-northeast1 region experienced a loss of network connectivity for a total of 62 minutes.

AWS guarantees regional independence for all services, and EC2 guarantees availability-zone independence.
Yep, though I do disagree with the logic of the Supreme Court case I mentioned. The federal government argued it was a legitimate exercise of Congress’s constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce. But growing weed in your backyard for personal use is clearly neither interstate, nor commerce. Alas, the commerce clause has been widely abused in many similar ways with the Supreme Court’s blessing.
But remember, Jeff Sessions was denied a federal judgeship in 1986 with the reason being, "He was too racist". Now how racist did you have to be in 1986 to be too racist?!

This is the same guy who in March of 1986 said he would refer to a white civil rights lawyer as (and I quote), "A disgrace to his race." He then went on to refer to the ACLU, NAACP, and National Council of Churches as communist inspired and un-american.

I'd almost argue it is hard to find anything he has done in good faith given his bias towards laws that overwhelmingly target racial minorities.

I say this as a pasty white dude who is appalled by the overwhelming amount of racism in our current executive branch.
The Shareholder Value Myth (2013)
There's a perfect analogy to religion.

One guy sees X% of the population is a member of faith group A, and X% is a member of faith group B, where A and B are incompatible, therefore the guy is depressed that somehow proves no religion has the one true answer and all are false insert peak nihilism here.

Another guy sees the same data and is elated that the solution set of "happy successful peacefully coexisting religious people" is such a large number provably at least two times X percent.

Which outlook resonates better, depends mostly on your personal model of how you want the world to work, rather than what actually works.
* Basic supply and demand. As long as you manage to hire developers, why pay more?

* The job market is a lot more scattered than in the US, there are fewer hubs concentrating software jobs. This dilutes competition.

* The job market is typically less fluid. This translates into more job security, but also a certain complacency.

* Europe hasn't seen the birth of many very-high margins software companies, generating millions per developer (off the top of my head I can think of SAP maybe, but that's B2B).

* Consequently, there's also less recognition for software developers, and their perceived value is lower than that of mechanical engineers for instance.

* Also, outdated management style is still fairly prevalent as you noted.

* VCs have no reason to push for salaries higher than necessary. European startups pitch cheap engineering as an advantage compared to being based in the Bay area.

I don't think egalitarianism has anything to do with our salaries. We might see the value in higher taxes, stronger labor rights, and a narrower income inequality. But I've never met a software developer who thinks they should inherently be less paid than say, a lawyer.
Is there any way to mitigate this without limiting abilities of people on the network? It kind of destroys the point of a LAN.
If you set aside the slow erosion of human decency that is the Daily Mail, their tech stack is very impressive.

From an engineering point of view they kill it, they're one of the most visited sites in the world.

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/dailymail.co.uk
Oh! of course. I was seeking comments on whether it is true that this behavior is not ISO C compliant.

I understand why this behavior is default, if you _have_ to support fork() this perhaps the more pragmatic default.
Knowing next to nothing about microprocessor design, I suppose the Mill architecture would also be vulnerable?
Imagine how this could be misused to start wars-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIvvHwFSZHs
Ask HN: Startup ideas you're too busy to work on?
Anyone have any ideas for startups they would like to see but don't have time to work on themselves?
US News and World Report Ranks Keto Diet Last
Convergence Labs | Mid-level Frontend React Developer | Salt Lake City, UT or REMOTE | Contract | $7-9K / month

Convergence Labs is the creator of Convergence, the world's first API designed from the ground up for collaborative co-editing. We do consulting work as well and recently landed an extremely interesting and ambitious project that is a perfect fit for our product. You would be our first hire and work directly with the founders.

This would be an excellent position for a smart and ambitious FE developer with a couple years of React experience. You'd be working directly with three industry veterans on a potentially transformative collaborative consumer-facing application. We are small and flexible, so just about everything is negotiable: 1099/W2, rate/salary, working from home, hours, equity, whatever.

Further information and contact information here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xcvi1yxLOml66TrCPLYHCCSo...
I haven't touched java in years, but have known this existed. How does it compare to some of the features added in recent versions of java that do similar stuff?
Even granting the considerable stretch that the VIA acquisition somehow renders part of Austin "within China" (I'm reminded here of the Babylon 5 episode "Day of the Dead"), I have my doubts that they'd throw away all pre-acquisition IP just to be able to make this claim. I guess they might have done so regardless to develop something with a newer workflow (e.g. for better verification), but my understanding is that it's not unusual to ship ~20-year-old HDL cores (e.g. UARTs) that are just synthesized with different gate libraries.
Blackmarket alcohol is not uncommon in the US. Particularly among poor white and hispanic populations. Most cultures have their equivalent of moonshine. You can easily buy illegally manufactured alcohol in every corner of Appalachia, basically all of the south, and poorer areas of every blue state including California and New York (most of NY being rural, and not particularly affluent, there's a healthy trade in illegal alcohol there as well, it is then sold in NYC as well).

You can get hooked up with illegal alcohol in basically every liquor store in every state in Appalachia, if you know someone that works there. It's commonly sold under the table so to speak.

edit: for wherever the downvotes are coming from - yes, I do know this stuff for a fact. I grew up in Appalachia, I know for a fact that what I'm saying is extremely common, I saw just about every aspect of the illegal alcohol trade first-hand. From that I came to learn second-hand the scope and nature of it up and down the east coast of the US and other parts of the country. It's easy enough to google this subject as well if you're skeptical.
Marginal costs may be small, but the initial costs are large. Once the initial costs get repaid, and as third parties reverse-engineer the process, the price of the treatment will drop.
I think someone that’s a subscriber has to make it available.
> There are so many laws on the books, many of them horribly outdated, and legislatures are overworked / grid locked. Often, the only way for us to have a working body of law that makes sense is for the government to simply stop enforcing the outdated ones.

Normalising this is a dangerous precedent. It leads to the situation where every citizen is technically a criminal according to the letter of the law, but it's not enforced as long as you don't stand out. But as soon as you annoy someone in government, they can choose to arrest and imprison you.
Facebook declines to say why it deletes certain political accounts
> Doesn't this mean that any program written in any programming language that supports multiple threads and spawns subprocesses is broken (it is racy for deadlocks, if the spawned process also wants to malloc)?

Yes.

> Are there known ways how people handle this problem?

The usual way is to ensure that after forking you only execute async-signal-safe code. Which includes exec(). So if you have more complicated logic which cannot be made async-signal-safe, you exec() an executable which performs that logic.

This is a massive pain though. For example setenv() is not async-signal-safe so if I want to exec() something with specific env vars then I have to go through /usr/bin/env. Sigh.
Humans are by definition not /in/human, though they can sometimes /act/ inhuman. However, by definition, corporations /are/ /not/ /human/, and they mostly act accordingly.
It works just fine, at least after 1.18. I switched from Sublime to Atom, mostly because it's open source and I'm using it daily at work w/o any issues.

My collegue tried VS Code, but it screwed a commit due to not updating the file after a checkout, so he went back to Sublime.
RISC-V is an ISA, so it depends on the implementation.
>In initiating the case, Mr. Sessions ignored allegations of similar behaviors by whites, choosing instead to chill the exercise of the franchise by blacks because of his misguided investigation. In fact, Mr. Sessions sought to punish older black civil rights activists, advisors, and colleagues of my husband, who had been key figures in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. These were persons who, realizing the potential of the absentee vote among Blacks, had learned to use the process within the bounds of legality and had taught others to do the same. Their only sin the committed was being too successful in gaining votes.

Coretta Scott King

https://www.snopes.com/coretta-scott-king-criticize-jeff-ses...
how long have you been working in the industry already?
You shouldn't look at profits to gauge how big a company is, you should look at revenues. Otherwise, Amazon would until recently be considered a tiny company. CoreCivic generates around $1.7B in revenues, far greater than your $200M figure. If your ratio of 200m = 3k cops, CoreCivic would be closer to ~25k cops.
What's interesting here is the social dimension of this. It's not enough that you are competent and have achievements. They key is that your achievements are recognized socially.
The inventor of GANs, which have been considered the most interesting idea in ML in the last decade, is Ian Goodfellow. I met him on reddit a few years ago. I was supposed to get private ML tutoring from him, just around the time Andrew Ng opened the first Coursera course. I didn't get lessons because I gave up and eventually took the MOOC. But it's amazing to know we share the same forums and sometimes exchange a comment or two.

The great idea about GANs is that they replace one of the most hard to understand parts of a neural net - the "Loss function" - with another neural net, thus making the loss function learnable. This opens up the door for a kind of unsupervised learning that was impossible to make work before. GANs are very very important also because they are almost like reinforcement learning (actor + critic = RL, generator + discriminator = GAN), and RL is supposed to be the way to AGI.

The most famous problem of GANs is instability during training and mode collapse - which is like a student learning especially for an exam (and not in general) thus optimising for the test instead of the real thing.
- we didn't have browsers compiling JavaScript into machine code

- we didn't have hyperconverged cloud infrastructures running arbitrary entities' code next to each other
I bet path dependence has something to say about that. Try to force people to use Dvorak keyboards at work. Even though that layout is demonstrably better (more comfortable and easier to learn), people are already used to Qwerty, still have a Qwerty keyboard at home, and would generally resist change.

Switching to GNU/Linux triggers similar problem: different GUI, still Windows at home, IT has to re-learn everything… Oh, and drivers. These aren't GNU/Linux's fault, but they still tend to underwhelm users.

I, mean, seriously: ever tried to have your grandma use LibreOffice? The number one problem won't come from bugs. It won't even come from its inability to read such and such Microsoft Word document. It will come from her inability to "save as .doc" or "save as .pdf" so other people can read the document (and even if she could, it's still a hassle). Network effects are not LibreOffice's fault, but they still tend to underwhelm users.
California getting to decide the will of Kansas is a broken system. It feels a lot like, say, the king of England ruling the colonies without representation.
How would one exploit a Google Cloud physical machine for example? One would still need to inject/patch a file to exploit processor right?
> this needs to be a state by state decision, not federal govt

According to the framers the federal govt has no authority at all to regulate the growing, distribution and sale of a product that takes place entirely within a state, so I do agree that this is a state decision.

But since the federal laws regulating cannabis activity within states are unconstitutional and unenforceable in the first place, eliminating or not enforcing them is merely complying with the law, not a change in law.
As I understand it, the Supreme Court already ruled against states' right on this matter in Gonzales v. Raich. That case was about medical marijuana, but I don't think that matters.

(IANAL.)
‪Red Hat qualifies the performance impact of Spectre meltdown mitigations
haven't played it but there is MHRD on steam which is a game about designing a CPU.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/576030/MHRD/
That's probably a cultural thing. In some cultures, red is superior to green.

Really, it's not about them being better or worse than a user with more Karna. It's just a signal to everyone that this person might be advertising or AstroTurfing.
Then why does the author use a truck analogy at the start? An student with that type of background would most likely be able to understand the concepts more abstractly.
The People's Republic of China and the Republic of China both agree there is a single China which includes Taiwan. They differ over who should govern it.
Dates to the 15th century, in fact.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/people
Collective Action Kills Innovation
Ask HN: What do you use for Feedback/Issue reports in your SaaS products?
We are evaluating what's the best way to allow customers to submit requests, issues, questions, and feedback and receive responses for those.

What do you recommend?
A (no BS) perspective on PLATFORMS/ECOSYSTEMS in the Retail tech market
Such a specialized AI would probably be more useful in practice, but that is not really what the Turing test is concerned with. The Turing test is a behaviorist approach to deciding the question if a computer "can think".

In any case, it think it is much easier to create an AI specialized in a particular domain rather than a general "human-like" AI.
Maybe. But I would love to see how mainstream religions of today try to handle a definitive proof of a separate tree of life elsewhere in space.
Sort of a chicken and egg thing. If the API and behavior makes it easy to abuse, people will abuse it. It might have helped if there were two different library functions (i) malloc that gave you physically backed memory and (ii) another that just reserved some address space.
> then mankind [ideally eventually] knows the primality of all primes

We already know the primality of all primes. They're prime. All numbers though . . .
I was not sure do NSA have any morals to flag about ??
So the American company operates over here low cost center and exploits all legal means for this location to remain low cost... but hey! enjoy your "salary disclosure freedom".
> you probably still just want a random key in a database.

In general, I think that this is the wrong approach, because that means adding a database round-trip (which in a large system is almost certainly a network round-trip) for each and every API call. Notably, if the entire system is secured in depth (which large systems should be), it means adding a network round-trip for every layer of the API (e.g. one for the frontend server to validate the user, then another for a backend server to validate the frontend server). Using a stateful token[0] replaces that network round trip with a public-key or hash verification, which is much faster.

> revocation is still an issue

I think that generally revocation concerns are a bit overblown. Even with a database lookup on every request, there is a (small) amount of time that one is willing to act on out-of-date information (after all, the user's access could be disabled immediately after the lookup, before the action is performed). Almost every business has some window in which it is willing to act on old information: better to make it explicit than to leave it implicit.

I really like the long-lived stateless token-refresh token[1] and relatively short-lived stateful access token approach often seen in OAuth2 setups. E.g. an email provider might only bother refreshing a read-email access token every five minutes or so, but might wish to refresh a delete-email or send-email token more frequently (or require a database lookup each time).

[0] When I write 'stateful token,' I mean a token which is full of state; confusingly, some folks calls this a 'stateless token,' because the relying systems do not need to store or consult state.

[1] When I write 'stateless token,' I mean a token which carries no state and thus must be looked up in some form of database — a random key in a database would suffice.
Same for when they broke HTTPS support because "we say so". The proper solution of updating the RFC is too slow for them.
Shorting stocks is already dangerous enough. You’re potential losses are infinite, your profits are fixed. Obviously you can use options to mitigate risk and juice returns, but then you have to be correct on timing as well as the companies valuation.

The only time I ever shorted, was because I correctly determined Krispy Kreme’s financials didn’t add up. I lost a ton of money because most of my options expired before how misleading their financials were became clear to the market, and the stock collapsed.

The bias in the public stock market is to pump stocks. Everyone (from investment bankers to brokers to media) is incented to give out rosy forecasts and valuations for companies. CNBC has always been a pumpers paradise.

Proportionately their is very few people who short stocks and with comparatively tiny amounts of money. They have a very tough job, but it’s an important one. They literally save people from being defrauded.

It’s really important that their free speech rights not be limited or stifled. Many times they have to fight bogus libel suits from the companies, like critics did in this story. It’s to easy for companies to sue to stifle legit criticisms already.
Meltdown doesn't _directly_ allow modification of code. However, a guest VM could run userspace code that accesses ring 0 / kernel memory of the hypervisor / physical machine.

This would mean that security certificates, passwords, etc of the hypervisor could be exposed, which could then allow compromise.
As an aside, I wish that anyone who is responsible for the creation of a cutesy logo for a software vulnerability were able to be punished by having said logo tattooed on their forehead and given a giant nuclear wedgie for being such an insufferable dweeb.
> if this is squarely an anti-India policy

This is pure racism against brown people despite them being ideal immigrants. But tariffs don't hurt Trump. It hurts American companies but hurts Indians even more.

The best response here is to give a full tax break to American companies who would be willing to move to India. Ideally open a red carpet, get rid of all tariffs and give all the freedom American companies ask for.
Geology is interesting I will grant that. However if you subtract life earth is much less interesting. All the rocks you can find on earth can be found on other plants in our solar system. You can go most places on earth examine all the rocks and say for each "very similar to some other rock from elsewhere". But the life in each place will be very different.

This is not to subtract from geology which is an interesting and useful study, just to say it is unlikely we would discover anything very new if we could somehow examine every planet in the universe. However if we add in life we would expect a lot of interesting variety to study.
A nice way to think about it.