skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In 1-2 words, IMO, the problem is "over-optimisation".

It is perhaps beneficial to be using an easily portable OS that can be run on older computers, and a variety of architectures.

Sometimes older computers are resilient against some of todays attacks to the extent those attacks make assumptions about the hardware and software in use. (Same is true for software.)

When optimization reaches a point where it exposes one to attacks like the ones being discussed here, then maybe the question arises whether the optimization is actually a "design defect".

What is the solution?

IMO, having choice is at least part of any solution.

If every user is effectively "forced" to use the same hardware and the same software, perhaps from a single source or small number of sources, then that is beneficial for those sources but, IMO, counter to a real solution for users. Lack of viable alternatives is not beneficial to users.
“Mars Climate Orbiter Mishap Investigation Board Phase I Report” [pdf]
Anyone know what "!!Con" is? I can't google for it, I just get the dictionary definition of "con"
Concretely, https://twitter.com/corsix/status/948670437432659970 can be used to get both `movzx rax, byte [somekerneladdress]` and `movzx rax, byte [rax+someusermodeaddress]` executed speculatively (the idea behind this is the same as a retpoline - exploit the fact that `ret` is predicted to return to just after the "matching" `call` instruction). If the first load is executed speculatively, it won't cause a page fault.
I'm fairly confident that the "anything" in GP refers to the concept of "any substance", as in flour, butter, chunks of metal, kilo of coke, some amount of olive oil, etc.
Y'know, the usual stuff, not something like your example.
(an aws employee, but just as in the dark as you are)

It'll be interesting to see how the golang lambda implementation is done, as i could see it being a backdoor into supporting any statically linked binary so long as it fits whatever constraints they need.
FYI: "Buy now" leads me to a 500 Internal Error.
That particular AWS forum post doesn't support your argument. Especially when Matt the AWS rep specifically acknowledged in that very thread that the update AWS had applied had had an effect on performance.

It matters not what the workload was running on before or accusations of laziness, the key takeaway from that post was that there was an impact on performance caused by the Meltdown/Spectre mitigations.

The fact another commenter barged into the thread with an unrelated issue simply shows that AWS forum operates within the Law of Forums (which states all threads are to be cross pollinated with unrelated issues from at least one other user).

EDIT: I should say that if this fellow is the only affected user from all the computer users of the world, then the mitigations applied can be called successful. That seems unlikely :-)
> But the time we spend improving efficiency is hugely elastic.

In the context of the above posts, "elastic" is an economic term used to refer to the demand curve. There is no supply/demand curve when it comes to internal technical decisions for optimization =)

I would say your work is highly correlated to the price of hardware per some unit of performance AND the amount of work that you need to complete AND the amount of hardware already available AND the cost of labor needed for optimization.

I imagine in your case, since these systems are tightly controlled, you can probably run unpatched without taking a substantial risk.
For this kind of exploit, I don't think you'd have to worry about the transaction. The NSA/(insert spy agency here) would gladly send a truck full of cash to your house for it (assuming they didn't know about it already).
It meant "allowing single family zoning near transit".
> It feels like horizontal integration; similar to what Elon Musk does with SpaceX by integrating the pipeline and producing everything internally to save costs.

Since the T2 is Apple's chip, this is vertical integration not horizontal. Owning the supply chain is vertical integration.
Yet another 80386 on steroids with no 64-bit and no SSE or a real modern CPU capable of running all the today OSes and apps efficiently?
As always, if you need the computer to get your work done now then you should buy it now. The next generation will always be better and faster.
'And especially half an hour before'

Not related to productivity as such, but...

In a previous life I was a manager in the construction industry.

And, generally speaking, before every meeting there was another meeting that only a few people were invited to.

If you didn't know about this meeting then God help you...

I'm guessing this wasn't an industry specific thing?
How's high DPI support on Ubuntu nowadays? My last experience (2 years ago?), everything was super small and when I tried changing the scaling it wasn't pixel-perfect. Literally had to return the laptop and get the 1366x768 version.
Can anyone explain how you cope with the 30s shutdown notice? Do you save your network every few iterations to your SSD or is it feasible to save the whole 16 GB from the P100 within the 30s window? I mean, we can freeze a running operating system (from RAM to disk), can do the same from GPU memory?
Do you have specific performance data for a comparable token validation?
https://undark.org/article/peak-pharma-drug-discovery/

Offers a fair amount of substance to back the notion that in general, medicine is going to be breathtakingly expensive in the near future. The state of biological and novel treatments now seem to support that notion. If you want to say that may change, even reverse, you need to offer more than personal incredulity to be convincing.
Kerberos vouching hinges on "ticket-granting server says...", and you know that because the tgt shares a secret with every player. On the face of it, it'd be much easier to just demand everyone know the tgt's public key (no need for N keys on the tgt for N participants).

I've long considered the merits of a kerberos-like system built on top of something like nacl... But without out-of-the-box support from all kinds of systems... It'd essentially build down to ssh+certificates with expiration dates... So i've gathered "better CA for ssh" is the better product. And there are thankfully a couple of projects in that vein (teleport, netflix/bless, others?).

[ed: i should add: I think
tptacek is absolutely right about public key systems being easier to get wrong; but part of that is also the problem domain: look at the history of security issues with Kerberos (both implementations and protocol evolution) for a great example. On the face of it NxN key exchange is "text book simple; should be easy to define, a little tricky to scale". Then there's replay, clock drift, (de)serialisation, nounces, large number of session keys (secure random numbers)...]
Building a Self Contained Deep Learning Camera in Python with Nvidia Jetson
Worked as a contractor for a federal agency, can confirm true, with a few variations: written score was weighted, and a cutscore eliminates candidates before oral portion. The written cutscore is adjusted downward until enough women and marginalized groups pass, and then candidates are weeded out in the oral phase, special consideration given to veterans and a few other categories.
Flagged by users is still a problem. A small number of users can flagkill a post even if it has a high score and an ongoing discussion, and vouching posts back to life almost never happens for the obvious reason that flagkilled posts don't tend to get seen by anyone who might vouch for it.
> What you get is that the peer can't forge tokens. But you're trying to authenticate to them; they already have full authority. So what are you fixing? (I'm not saying it's "nothing", but I am saying it's very little, and it's definitely plausible the increased risk isn't worth it.)

You get something you can show to a third party: 'see, the bank said their client was good for $10,000!' I can see where that might be useful.
> but isn't that the whole point of GANs?

not quite, but youre on the right path.

think about it this way: you (the generative model) are trying to predict a unit gaussian, which is just a fancy way to say bell curve. you get +1 if you predict a number in this distribution (eg 0.1 or -0.5, which is within one standard deviation of the mean of 0); you get -1 if you predict a number thats "far" from this distribution (something like 40 - which has an infinitesimally low probability of being drawn from a unit gaussian).

mode collapse, then, is when you predict 0 all the time. yes, you are technically correct but youve failed to learn the true distribution.

obviously ive simplified this quite a bit and have anthropomorphize the model, but i hope you get the gist. otherwise, the [original paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2661) is refreshingly easy to read.
Pretty sure that would count as habitual sleep deprivation, and thus you'd incur brain damage on a regular basis. Plus your productivity will go straight into the dumpster after about a week or two.

As someone who's no stranger to sleep dep, I strongly advise you to avoid that course of action.
It's been at around $40/mo net since March, briefly shooting up to over $100/mo in July (when the price of Eth increased faster than network Hashrate) and now it's back down to $40/mo. The overall profit is higher than the sum of the monthlies because I managed to hold some Eth rather than selling.
Testing Windows 10 Performance Before and After the Meltdown Patch
I like the Star Trek teleporter angle, because it shows us how we're susceptible to narrative explanations over actual explanations.

The way the Star Trek teleporter works is that you step into it, and then you are dismantled, picked apart atom-by-atom. You cease to exist. You die. You are gone.

But immediately afterwards, elsewhere, atoms-by-atoms are put together again, to form a thing that looks like you and talks like you and has your memories. To outside observers, there's no difference between the you that stepped into the teleporter, and the thing that stepped out of it on the other side. The narrative tricks us, first you're here, and then you're over there. Of course it's still you!

But the reality of the thing doesn't in any way guarantee the transfer of an unbroken consciousness. And I'm quite attached to mine, thank you very much.

I see the arguments downthread about how sleeping or going unconscious aren't guarantees of your unbroken consciousness, and the rabbit-hole of existential dread that entails. But come on. The fact that the matter that makes up me is pretty static, makes it pretty reasonable that my consciousness is unbroken after a nap.

But anything that involves movement of my consciousness without also moving the matter that my consciousness emerges in, has to have some serious fucking rationale for me to believe that it will lead to an unbroken consciousness.

And, of course, asking the philosophical zombie if it really is me in there, doesn't count.
WEB4J. Because simple is beautiful
My guess is that Turing thought that you wouldn't need to make such a choice, and that a robot that could analyze the intricacies of medical diagnosis could surely be able to talk about the weather. It's much like you don't have to make a choice between your program being able to do medical diagnosis and the program having a full-color graphical interface (or even a touch interface on your phone, these days).

In other words, I think that Turing was simply wrong on this point. Though, it's not hard to imagine a future where it becomes cheap to make a program pass a Turing test, changing our expectation of what the user interface for a computer should be like.
I love this guy. His videos on Numberphile are great.
Show HN: Easily generate GIF from PDF files
Until a few days, researchers couldn't prove that this was possible because there was no example of such exploits. But there was the idea that this could be possible. Also this doesn't mean that people with other interests didn't have their own versions of this exploit and kept it a secret.
No, consumption doesn't fill that need. "The rich will still need the masses to consume the products the rich sell" is a tune that some economists whistle through the graveyard when they're brave enough to contemplate the end of human labor but not brave enough to contemplate that automation might render most of their discipline obsolete.

That said, I don't think that the rich can wage a successful war of extermination against the poor. If we reach the point where human labor is completely obsolete, and any old plutocrat can fab up a robot army, then it's not just exterminationist billionaires who get access to robot armies. It's also philanthropic billionaires, and national or even regional elected leaders, and perhaps even robot "pirates" who are just duplicating robots without permission. That's an existential risk to civilization in that it takes a much smaller group to threaten global violence than it did circa 1940. But it also means that the most a rational Evil Billionaire can hope for is mutually assured destruction; any overtly violent attempt at eliminating the poor can trigger a cataclysmic war, but the EB can't rationally expect to kill off the masses and get away with it unopposed. EB better have already uploaded his backup consciousness to offsite Martian storage before trying that one. (But if he's an immortal being who can live in space, why would EB even want to kill his way to more control of property on Earth? This is like the implausible plot of a bunch of alien invasion stories where societies capable of interstellar travel still want to come here to violently seize our dirt and water, for some reason.)
This is also fake news, aka propaganda.

Do you remember that 4 core 2GHz Via cpu from 2015? or maybe that 8 core 2016 one? All paper products https://www.pcgamesn.com/sites/default/files/VIA%20CPU.jpg
I regret buying a maxed out XPS 13 a year and a half ago.

My list of problems:

* Coil whine

* Noisy fans

* Heat issues

* USB-C port has a bad pin (only works in one orientation with pressure)

* Charging port inconsistently charges

* Bad cell in the battery, so it suddenly shuts off without warning when on battery

The charging issues started just around the 12 month mark, so I quickly sent to a repair center under warranty. They returned it with a note that said "mainboard replaced", but nothing had actually been replaced. Same bad pin on the USB-C port (everything I plug into it only works "upside down", and that port is part of the mainboard), same dust in the ports as when I mailed it, etc. By the time they shipped it back, the warranty had expired.

If you're going to buy one of these, I recommend buying an extended warranty. I do also recommend the touchscreen. I've heard the i5 versions have less problems, I would probably take the performance hit next time if it meant a more reliable and longer-lasting machine.
You already knew this though?
Multiple ways to do it. All lead to you getting to the /etc/passwd file and the hash inside for the root.

If you have IRIX installation CD then you can even set the new password, but you probably don't have it? You can also put the disk into another SGI, also not what everyone has. If guest account is enabled, login with guest (no password) and just cat the /etc/passwd. If guest account is not enabled, you can do the cat via sash, which is a bit more compicated, like this: https://web.archive.org/web/20151023042224/http://crackaddic...

Once you have your hash, do it with John the Ripper (GPU version). Store the password int a text file in format of root:hash and run john the ripper on it. Encryption is, AFAIK, DES so use john --format=des passwd.txt if john doesn't autodetect which encryption it is (I remember I had to set it manually). It can take awhile, depending on the GPU, but not that long.

If you run into trouble, I can have a look. I think I wrote down somewhere what to do, in case I need it again.
> If linear trends continue (they won’t fortunately, some kind of large crisis will reset them) we’ll be talking about preparing kids to be a “CEO!” at 14 or earlier, maybe even there will be “CEO Camps”. What a delight...

In England, those are called boarding schools. My understanding is that the good ones exist to teach their students how to talk all proper-like, and to have a healthy disdain for the proles.
I use Qbserve, can vouch for it being a very nice tracking system. Can't vouch about its privacy guarantees, but only because I haven't double-checked them. (I use Qbserve only on my work computer on which I don't plan on doing anything I wouldn't my employer to know). It does have some kind of database in which URLs/programs have a crowdsourced taxonomy. For example, I think news.ycombinator.com is by default flagged as "Distracting" activity. For sites/programs that haven't been classified as "Productive" or "Distracting", things are put into a "Neutral/Uncategorized" bucket. And you can go into the details panel and manually classify the content for yourself.

When doing the classification, there is a checkbox for "Send to developers to improve Qbserve": https://imgur.com/a/Rei0e

I have no reason to assume that that checkbox is obeyed, or that info isn't leaked in other ways -- but just saying I haven't tried to verify it FWIW.

There was a front-page Show HN from Qbserve 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11778077
It's like we spent 20 years building houses out of wood, and then suddenly someone discovered fire.

Goodness you just described my current work situation that's causing me to rip my hair out. This is a deeply human problem, and I've spent a year trying to mitigate it, but each time the discussion comes up I leave the conference room feeling like certain actors have a personal financial stake in wool fibers.

(No I don't work for Intel)
After waiting for over a month now on my Coinbase purchase being stuck in Pending status, with absolutely no response from their Support, I'm getting tired of seeing Coinbase being seen as a leader in the Cryptoverse.
I find it so frustrating all these well funded companies just sit on their cash and don't actually accomplish anything.
I just replaced my 5 year old XPS 13 and didn't even bother researching other laptops. Hands down the best hardware I've ever owned.
Maybe a tangent, but I never really understood how the memory pointed to by envp is supposed to be managed. Does fork() copy the allocator state such that you can just do malloc(), fork(), then free() in the parent process, then execve() blows away the whole memory map in the child?
It's not that I need to do many tasks, it's that this one task calls for lots of RAM, and it's best if I can do it freely instead of only doing it overnight like a batch-mode cave dweller.

I have a build that when done from scratch calls upon the linker in such a way, it needs about 12G working set, and it's much faster if that's RAM. It took 'overnight' when I had 8G and if I was present, I could barely do anything else.
There are reports on Reddit that NVidia's driver is affected due to heavier usage of patched functionality which would mess with both gaming and Deep Learning. In both, 5-10% drop is pretty unacceptable as that is often basically performance offset to lower-tier card (e.g. non-Ti vs Ti card).
There were tens of millions of EeePCs sold. At one point Asus EeePCs were outselling all Macbooks.
Is this a joke? 'wtf'-lab indeed. What is the 'donate' button for?
Unfortunately, selfspy's UX is subpar and it doesn't look like it's in active development anymore.
This is so weird, AMD is just as vulnerable
it's actually not terrible if you are willing to use the unity desktop... but as I understand it canonical won't be supporting unity and is switching back to Gnome, which is... a bag of tweaks and scaling.

I've been using Elementary (an Ubuntu Gnome fork) which delivers a slightly better out of the box ui.
Return it. Apple replaces faulty devices liberally.
Spectre allows one process to extract the memory of another process (assuming certain conditions are met). I would not call that boring.
Biased sample for sure, but me and my friends/colleagues in the midwest at companies with DS teams of <10 people, often <5. Companies/teams far too small to separate the builders from the shippers.

I also practice data science from a more engineering angle than many which further colors my opinions. Building models is fun, but I also enjoy deployment and maintenance, so I don't _want_ to hand that part off.
I did not have relations with that token
How could you differentiate between people who use their computers least as being the most productive (they get everything done in the shortest time and then do something else), or the least productive (they do the least work)? Or the people who use their computers most as the most productive (they get the most done), or least productive (they spend more time on work activities but still fail to complete things).

Only measuring how much time you spend on something isn't enough to measure your productivity.
So... I read the article and I still don't know what, exactly, is the T2 chip or what, exactly, makes it different from other ARM / Intel hybrids, other than several different ways of expressing "it's incredibly, totally great" and "Intel is untrustworthy, so let's trust Apple instead" and "this changes everything all over again".

(It doesn't, unless you arbitrarily consider small, incremental changes exclusive to Apple products as the opposite of small and incremental just because of the size of Apple.)
> Yeah yeah lets abandon perfectly usable piece of technology because some john smith from the internet hates oracle

It's doesn't need to be hate, anyone concerned about the well-being of this industry should be wary of being an enabler/complicit. Oracle is actively malicious: remember this is the company that was actively trying to make API's copyrightable[1]. How many APIs do you use in a day do you think such a ruling would have impacted? You wouldn't be able to have drop-in replacement libraries (or web-services). Hell, it would have made it illegal to fork an open source project unless you got the copyright to the API as well.

Given a viable choice between an Oracle project and a non-Oracle project, always go for the latter.

[1]https://www.computerworld.com/article/2857293/legal/oracle-a...

edit: changed to past tense: I had forgotten the supreme court refused the case, but that just means the argument hasn't been tested in the courts.
> The test of believability
yep! that is the fundamental limitation of adversarial networks. theres no good measure or "loss", as it's highly subjective.
Investing in You
Do they ? If your usage is 50% userspace, 50% kernel, then having each slice slow by 10% does not result in a 20% slowdown.
>who plugs phones into computers anymore?

Eh? How do I transfer my music to my phone?
Yes, since from what I understand, any heavier elements would be so unstable they wouldn't last a billionth of a second.
Got it. -0.01 per person, not -0.01 in total.
Beberapa Nama Yang Memiliki Unsur Keberuntungan
A lot of these newer NVMe SSD's these days have such insane I/O that swaps are significantly faster. That said RAM is still preferable (especially when working with multiple VMs)
The FreeBSD people were notified a week or so ago.

* https://www.freebsd.org/news/newsflash.html#event20180104:01

The Ubuntu people also got that same notification it appears, but were also secretly told by Intel in November 2017.

* https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SecurityTeam/KnowledgeBase/SpectreAn... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16071769)

People are claiming that the OpenBSD people knew years ago, but what Theo de Raadt was discussing then was a list of published errata for the Core Duo. The bugs that are in the news right now were never published errata. I suspect that the OpenBSD people found out about them at the same time that the world at large did.

* https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=118296441702631&w=2
>No, they’re not.

The article explicitly mentions that they teach them these things.
I hear Intel's PR department is hiring, if you're interested.