skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My understanding of this situation is this:

Meltdown: Easier to exploit, fixable in software but perhaps up to a 30% performance hit for some operations.

Spectre: Harder to exploit, not fixable in software, needs new hardware.

See these two links for more detail:

https://twitter.com/nicoleperlroth/status/948684376249962496

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/reading-pri...
It's a mess. Palm rejection is terrible. I use a wireless mouse with my XPS 13.
Where is the patch for the Linux kernel, and what kernel options have to be set? Also, are there any compilation options that need to be set?
If two laws contradict one another, the executive must make a determination which to follow; it cannot follow both. It could choose to follow the newest, or the oldest, but fortunately the Constitution itself spells out the precedence of the laws: 'This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.'

The Constitution takes precedence over federal law, and the executive must refrain from executing a law which is unconstitutional.
Yes, that is the long term goal.

Project Metropolis is about rewriting OpenJDK C++ parts in Java, so SubstrateVM needs to support all major OpenJDK targets.
Not sure how this hurts Intel much, they essentially have a monopoly on the CPU space, AMD is only really competing because of their GPU unit. AMD can't scale to meet demand if there were a big shift from cloud providers. Even there Nvidia is miles ahead of everyone (GPU.) The thing is that, if anything, this could help Intel sales, because the only way to -truly- stop this is to get new chips...which Intel will provide, and vendors will have no choice for many larger clients. ARM chips have the same exploits (both variants.) AMD can't scale its business for that kind of demand, and its chips are slower...so what are you going to do?

I doubt the CEO is exactly shaking in his boots or sold for that reason. I'd even be willing to bet Intel will provide a fix on the hardware and continue to use the same sockets so cloud providers can just change them out without further hardware changes.

Intel's stock will probably trade down to 40, fill the gap and continue its uptrend, largely because the market is very bullish on the chip space right now.
If it was kept secret, what would the value of this zero day exploit have been on the black market?
Jet Airways grounds two senior pilots for fighting in cockpit mid-flight
Similar to C; you can do OpenGL stuff, etc. Business logic things work too. It's the same as C; you produce a C abi, load it up the way you'd load up a C library.

We support both targets in-tree.
What I would really love (and use heavily!) is a sort of "AWS Lambda" for GPUs.

I don't think anyone has such a product at this point.
HQ Trivia fights dirty. Google allows it
I was a bank robber until I read Kant
Etsy: Selecting a Cloud Provider
As noted later in thread, a proper writeup for Linus & co. was in progress when the vulnerability was disclosed in advanced of the 1/9 publication date, and so Linus was missing a lot of context for the patch when he wrote the email linked by this post.
multiple VMs
Someone bribing a hotel clerk and Attorney General being in the news for talking about enforcing a law that hasn't been enforced in a while is a very far cry from the way police pull you over for arbitrary reasons and routinely expect bribes in some other countries. They can technically be phrased in similar ways, but the US is hardly on par with, say, Zimbabwe in terms of corruption.

My point is that the federal government can really screw people over when it chooses to. I'd still choose to live here than in most third-world countries, though.
> This is not a bug or a flaw in Intel products. . .[the] system is operating exactly as it is designed to.

So Intel has learned nothing and will be prone to similar mistakes in the future.
I imagine most laptop and motherboard vendors have precisely zero interest in locating/dusting-off whatever toolchains are required to mint new BIOSes for long discontinued products.
My XPS 13 9350 is undoubtedly the best computer I've ever owned. I don't seem to have this coil whine thing or I just don't notice it. The 8GB of RAM has served me well and I'd never want to sacrifice any of the battery life for increasing that - it's an ultrabook after all. I've always run Ubuntu and while I did have problems with WiFi and resuming when it first came out, they are both rock solid now. I have never tried to use the webcam, I don't even know if it works, so I'm happy with the design choice to minimise the top bezel. I personally see no reason to buy the new model but only because this one is so good.
I wonder what Linus thinks about all of this. Does he still believe this is no different than a random UI bug, as he used to say not too long ago about security bugs?
Instead of teaching employees to use git, why don't you put all of your data files on S3 and enable versioning?

If the non-engineers are just using git to upload and version json files full of data without modifying the code that reads them, uploading to s3 seems like a much safer and easier way to accomplish the same goal (without building CRUD interfaces to handle it).
Innovation Makers: The Coyote Suit
Hi HN, This is a video of my experience running a value-priced deep learning consulting workshop. Let me know if you have any specific questions about value-based pricing and the ticket buying process. -Sam
Same here with 1-year old HP laptop.
It makes sense but 5-10 year old laptops aren't uncommon nowadays.

Had this occurred 20 years ago nobody would have cared because computers would get replaced super fast anyway. Nowadays, even a geeky household can have 5+ year old CPUs lying around and still used.
Fingers crossed for new CEO?
Expected the new XPS to have a developer flavor soon, but also expected it to be limited to 16GB still. Was not surprised since the Windows version has the same limit.

Went ahead and purchased a 32GB System76 Galaga Pro last week with the same i7-8550U available on the XPS. It's a slightly larger 13", but feels a lot closer to my 5th gen XPS 13 than the MacBook Pro the Galaga replaces. Comes with a retina-like matte IPS 3200x1800 screen that is a joy to use. No touch, for better or worse. Keyboard layout is actually superior to the XPS for development with dedicated home/end/pgup/pgdn buttons. Pop!OS is nice and worth a spin, plus it has XPS levels of support under Ubuntu 16.04 which is available pre-loaded. Camera is in a much more useful place than on the XPS. It's also cheaper at most configurations.

Downsides are a smaller battery (probably to make room for both an M.2 SSD and a 7mm 2.5" drive bay) and a touchpad that while multitouch and decent isn't as good as the XPS touchpad. Also, while the screen hinge feels more solid than the XPS's, it doesn't go back as far as I would expect. XPS uses better materials in spots, like soft touch carbon fiber in palm.

So far I'm extremely happy with the Galaga Pro and would recommend to anyone who wants a small powerful laptop like the XPS 13, but is turned off by its 16GB limitation.
It feels like every time I hear something about Wiener, he's doing stuff that needs to get done. I'm tempted to send him some money even though I'm not in his district.
I my case it adds up: Slack, Docker CE (that spins up a VM on Mac) for tests, corporate Docker EE setup (runs alongside Docker CE), elasticsearch, kafka, and 9 more services inside that corporate Docker setup, two Chromes (Chrome Stable and Chrome Canary), multiple VSCode instances.
And if you need to build something with boost or folly you can add 3GB ram just for that.

I realize that my setup is not common but I'd appreciate to have an option. (Mind you, I'm primarily talking in Mac perspective because work laptop has strict platform requirements.)

Edit: Disclaimer: currently using MacBook Pro 15".
yeah, but another thing I am worried is that if I want to get a rust job, I should be able to do interview problems in rust, which mostly consist of linked list, tree and graph.
And that's how we'd get the Dell XPS 13 with Notch™.
I have no idea when people started saying is a 30% hit on the cpu! In reality is average of <=5% : https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/7o2ctw/benchmarke...

EDIT: found it! 5-30% as reported by theregister : https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/02/intel_cpu_design_fl...
Presumably your target audience cares about the application of PCA, rather than the mathematical technique for its own sake. Thus, you need to answer the question “What does it do for me?” before the question “How does it work?” I believe that the answers to these two questions are, respectively, the geometric interpretation of a PCA, and the algorithm for computing a SVD decomposition. But I could be wrong! If you think I'm wrong, please tell me how.
> Also what visa allows immigrants to skip university enrolment and be directly employed in a small town small business?

The student visa allows one to be in the country for an indetermine amount of time (until their degree is done) and that person is free to obtain employment while enrolled in university
I can't stress this enough.

Education won't make you rich, or famous, but it will pay the bills.

The biggest hurdles are going to be initial program development and then initial roll out (your first customers) and sadly your probably going to have to do this on your own dime.

If you can build an initial draft of what you want to do, and then fund it yourself most schools will happily trade "feedback" for free stuff.

There is a caveat in all this: you need to find a way to fund your program going forward. Most schools ignore grant writing much more than they should and the feds love to give out money. If you can find a program that is already administered (state or federal) and give the schools your working with a template for application then most of them are going to jump at the chance to take advantage of what your offering.
Thanks, I have been planning to start writing when I grow up for quite some time now.
> Koretz said the bill would lead to an increase in new home building that would snarl traffic and go against what his constituents want in their neighborhoods.

> Better ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would be eliminating gasoline-powered cars and even gas stations in the city over time, he said.

Statements like this drive me crazy. While EVs can help in reduction of greenhouse gas, it will not do as much as allowing people to move less on a daily basis.

Regardless of the source, moving less stuff (only yourself vs. yourself and a car) and doing it for a shorter distance will result in the use of less energy which leads to fewer emissions of greenhouse gases.
Very cool that he found a flaw in the algorithm

But this is really the antithesis of what a zero-day originally was, which was a crack circulated on or even before the release day of software[0]. The Alto is 45 years old :)

Odd how words and phrases can change so much over a short period of time that they invert their meaning.

[0] that's what it meant in the early / mid 1990s when I was peripherally involved. Now it seems to mean 'zero days of notification to the vendor'.
Not everything. In-order CPUs such as Cortex-A7 and Cortex-A53 are not affected. Confirmed by Arm at https://developer.arm.com/support/security-update "all other Arm cores are NOT affected"
Did they solve the not-so-well-known problem of Content Adaptive Brightness Controll (CABC) not being disableable for FHD models? People do not speak very much about this, but for me it's actually a game changer.
I was so close to buy one of those new xps 13" during holiday sales, but when I read that they do not simply allow you to disable the CABC option on FHD models (whereas you can on QHD models by updating the BIOS), I completely changed my mind on Dell models - actually, CABC was just part of the reason, the others being coil whine, quality control issues, no sane ports...
It's not about whether Medium supports LaTeX. Just look at this: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*APPNIwQqDG4PVGyLL...
So this was reported half a year ago and only now after publication Intel releases updates?
0 usages of word "fuck"

1 usage of word "shit"

Not bad for Linus.
I'm not sure we can call it bad luck, since Dell has a lot of control over the timing of their product releases.
Blockchain Startups Need Recruiters
Adding my own experience, rustup works well on macOS and I don't have any issues with brew doctor either.
Maybe, maybe not. I looked around a bit and found [1]"that the Intel SGX does not clear branch history when switching from enclave mode to non-enclave mode", which suggests either that the SGX designers were unaware of the dangers of not separating branch prediction between privilege levels, or that Intel intentionally weakened SGX so as to not reveal the similar flaw in their ring0/ring3 separation.

1: https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.06952 (Nov '16)
Like Intel didn't spend tons of money over the past 20 years on TV commercials playing a unique set of musical tones to convince you to buy a computer with a flawed chip inside.
For those like me are running Linux and asking how to update the BIOS, lenovo provides a ISO file. Quoting from [1]:

"The BIOS Update CD can boot the computer disregarding the operating systems and update the UEFI BIOS (including system program and Embedded Controller program) stored in the ThinkPad computer to fix problems, add new functions, or expand functions as noted below."

[1]: https://support.lenovo.com/fr/en/downloads/ds120430
Open source visibility is hugely exaggerated, are you going to read one million lines of code or more ? You think others will do when every open source project struggles to even find contributors to fix small bugs ?

Sure its more visible than closed source, no question, but still it's no angel.

Apple is no angel either but at least they do not pretend to be ;)
I do enjoy picked herring, but only with plain pickling. None of those sweet or creamy preperations
I value Apple’s stance on privacy, and I agree that Apple balking at Google’s terms to get user information from maps was the right decision. But I don’t believe it added any deposit of trust from Maps — on the contrary, its own implementation was so poor to get trashed in the press and was the main reason Scott Forstall was fired. I’ll say it again, based on personal experience (even recently), Apple Maps is still pathetic to be completely useless in many Asian countries. It didn’t and doesn’t garner any trust in those places.
Currently harder than plain C or C++, due to lack of integration with mixed debugging on Android Studio, integration with the Gradle/CMake build infrastructure and extra effort of writting FFI bindings to Android native APIs.
You could just put a sticker on it, company logo or something. There's only one place where the logo is visible anyway.
Stop trying to make the analogy fit. It's not a good analogy.
A Very Cost Effective Way to Buy NEO with USD
You're right, I was conflating two things. It looks like no in-order ARM cores have branch prediction though.
The new thin/light one ("stealth") is quad core.
I misread this as Safeway, and was really surprised for a minute.
gitlab, or self hosted git?
It sounds like something I'd name my dog. I don't like Jenkins, either. Clearly it's just personal taste, but I prefer either completely made up names, or names of inanimate objects. I think Rust is great, for example. I don't like "Travis". This is all just my own, subjective, personal opinion though. I apologize if my comment came off harshly.
Which is half true. All of them are vulnerable to Spectre. So far as I've heard only Intel (and maybe ARM) are vulnerable to Meltdown, because Meltdown exploits the lack of security checks on speculative execution that only Intel implemented. It's ambiguous if ARM is vulnerable, I've only heard people saying either "maybe" or that they haven't validated that.

Edit: Elsewhere I found a link to ARMs page where they breakdown exactly which of their processors are vulnerable to both Metldown and Spectre and it looks like quite a few of them are vulnerable to one or both of them.
Imagine some code running in some walled-off privileged space (like the kernel) that looks something like this:

if(i < length) {
value = data[i]
doStuff(lookupTable[value])
}

Let's say you can run this code with an arbitrary value for `i` (maybe it's the parameter to a system call). From a high-level view, this code is perfectly safe. If `i` is out of bounds, nothing happens. If it's in bounds, the system does something with the data at i, presumably something you're allowed to do.

But what really happens on a modern CPU when `i` is out of bounds? It's possible that the value for `length` is not available and has to be loaded from memory, which can take several hundred CPU cycles in the worst case. It's also possible that the CPU will make a guess that the `if` branch will be taken. If that happens, then execution looks something like this:

try to compare i < length
can't, because length is not yet available
guess the branch will be taken, begin speculatively executing it:

initiate the loading of length
load data[i]
load lookupTable[value]
...possibly some more stuff...

eventually, the load of length completes
oops, turns out i >= length
roll back all of the speculative stuff above

Normally none of this is visible. But, the memory loads have side effects. Namely, they modify the CPU's caches. By attempting to load different locations in memory and looking at how long it takes, you can figure out which locations got cached during that speculative execution phase. Since one of those locations was determined by an out-of-bounds load of data[i], that means you can use this to figure out the data stored at an arbitrary location in this privileged space.

It requires speculative execution of a branch that ends up not being taken, because if the speculative execution was correct then you haven't gained access to anything you're not supposed to know, and if there was no speculative execution then you never load anything out of bounds.

This is simplified and probably wrong in some aspects, but that's the rough idea.
50% of Democrats believed George W Bush was complicit in 9/11 [1].

People like to believe their own tribe is the exalted one, but exploiting the uninformed isn't a partisan strategy.

[1] https://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2011/04/more-than-h...
When You Should (and Shouldn't) Use Firebase
And when we're not safe, it will be too late, if you want to take that argument to its conclusion.
I ordered a Dell XPS 13 Developer edition in 2013. I picked Ubuntu Linux and the email confirmation said Ubuntu on it. Wait a week, it arrives, it runs Windows. Ugh.

I was so confident that we had moved past it being this hard to buy a linux laptop, in 2013, but I guess not.

All of my friends made fun of me for trying to buy a linux laptop. I ended up failing as hard as possible, being out thousands of dollars while I waited for the refund. Eventually I gave in and got Mac from the store, which I'm still using today. I desperately wish I could have got an XPS 13, but they took my money and gave me the wrong product. It's too risky to try it again.
Then why do you hear more about Android vulnerabilities than iOS vulnerabilities?
In classic physic, nothing is a concept true, in quantum physic with the foam of virtual particles coming from the void (see casimir effect) 'nothing' is a much nebulous concept!
It makes me excited and happy to think of other life out there, waiting to meet us. But sad that I will probably not be around to witness it.
+1 for pachyderm; my team and I are using it to build backtesting platforms for financial modeling, and it's been really nice to use. Also great in combination with Gitlab's built-in CI/CD stuff. Product aside, we've appreciated the team's availability on both Slack and Github too.
Aha, I missed the stateless negotiation-less flow. But yes, that's basically TLS as deployed in browsers :)
On most laptops you can swap the killer WiFi card for an Intel one using a screwdriver and 15 minutes. Drivers also "just work" on all three relevant desktop OS for the Intel chipset.
I'm really happy about USB-C. Since I got a new Macbook I only carry a single power adapter when traveling, plus an adapter dongle for legacy devices (Headphones, Kindle, Shaver, ...).

Same for use in the office: a single cable connects you to power, an external display, Ethernet, etc.

It's true that most external devices are still USB-A, but that's not Dell's or Apple's problem. It's a chicken-and-egg situation and somebody needs to start.

USB-C is the superior connector: longer lasting, reversible, works for charging, alternate modes, etc.
Most databases these days got some automatic admin interface which let users edit the data, usually with some roles and permissions to what people can or can't do. I don't see the big advantage of letting people edit files directly if all they need to change is data.
system architects at intel, obviously.
Huge difference.

If you're in a country where they sell the Surface Book, go take a look and you'll immediately notice that there is a _lot_ more vertical space.
Update host software to (partially?) mitigate guest applications extracting host memory contents.

Update guest software to (partially?) mitigate guest applications extracting guest memory contents.
The T2 is rumored to be a derivative of the A10.
My favorite part of fork+exec is the _temporary_ exhaustion of virtual address space on a heavily loaded system, where the parent process is using a shitton of memory. 50G forked is instantly 100G of virtual address space, even if it is followed by an exec. Couple this with sysadmins not configuring swap files means that virtual address space == physical address space. On a heavily loaded system, high memory using processes can't even launch simple utilities w/o incurring the wrath of the OOMK. Configure swap, even if it will never be used, it still affects the size of your virtual address space.
I found ID is the norm in Europe. But, in the US, I doubt if it's more than half the time.
Move it to the top of your list. Anaconda is absolutely where you should start if you are trying to mess with ML/Predictive.
Only one HN comment so far? Embarassing!
Unlike "neglecting the fact that heat could still pass through the layers", speculative execution doesn't merely allow something that was previously possible. It allows something that was previously impossible, and while doing so undermines another, more critical, feature of the processor.
Just a bit more vertical space (a few? a dozen? more lines of code per screen) vs slightly wider screen (better for movies, and games maybe). It may be nitpicking, I actually grew used to 16:9 aspect ratios and don't really mind it.
Watching the progress of this system reminds me of that scene at the beginning of The Thing where The Thing almost but not quite mimicks one of the humans.
What is this never ending propaganda
Yeah, but it would still redirect, since that's a different layer of the IP stack.

You could prevent wifi clients from communicating arp packets, I think that would allow most things to work.

If you have a corporate wifi system, you should be watching for arp poisoning anyway. If it's a public system, most people aren't using it to communicate between wifi devices. Most android devices that communicate via wifi will generate their own wifi network for the duration of the communication.
Sure, something might fly under the radar for a while, but once there's an accusation of impropriety or a security hole discovered, anyone can look into it.