skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Let me make my position clear. The miracle, and I do not mean it in the religion sense, I mean it in the evolutionary sense, the miracle of the evolution, is the cell. While there are theories involving an RNA world and selforganising, it remains a mystery. Once you had the eukaryotic cell from the point of view of evolution and development it was downhill all the way, very very easy. "

Lewis Wolpert : https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-0348-8026-8_...
When using macOS the ambient light sensor is afaik only used for the brightness of the keyboard backlight.

The brightness of the TouchBar isn't related to ambient light and just depends on the usage of the MacBook Pro. In use it's simply on with full brightness, after 1 minute of inactivity it dims to a certain level, before shutting off the TouchBar completely 15 seconds later. While macOS doesn't allow to customize these timeouts, the experimental Linux driver [1] does.

[1]: https://github.com/roadrunner2/macbook12-spi-driver
This appears to be the case at least on my Windows 10 laptop.

I've installed the hotfix for Windows, but when I run the PowerShell script to determine whether mitigation is active, the script tells me that it's not active, due to lack of hardware support. The script then goes on to give the recommendation to "Install BIOS/firmware update provided by your device OEM that enables hardware support for the branch target injection mitigation."

It's a 1-year-old ASUS laptop and I would be surprised if they even give a sane response to my question to their technical support (I doubt they will even know what I'm talking about).
And then RAM prices shot way up. That may have something to do with it. I'm holding off on a new home virtualization server build for now, hoping that RAM prices come back down.
The vernacular usage of mankind refers to the self described species, which is homo sapiens. The mistitled Telegraph article is talking about the species that was "a member of the tribe of hominins and the direct ancestor of homo." Literally not even in our own genus, but an ancestor of it.

I do, though, understand how easy it is to confuse all the various terms; our brains unfortunately aren't optimized for the type of rigor demanded of science.
Sure. But that applies to almost any problem I face on a daily basis as a programmer.

I don’t see why optimizing my flow and tools should be less important than optimizing what I deliver. The former practically enables the latter.

This mindset is pretty much what has given us the high quality FOSS projects we use everywhere. I wouldn't really call this is a “problem”.
Get an AMD, there will be many new models coming out soon.
Surface laptop has 3:2 screen AFAIK.
My first PC had a Cyrix CPU, a P166+, running at 133MHz. PC vendors building middle- to low-end PCs liked them, because they were cheaper than Intel, and for most stuff people did with their PCs back then, it offered acceptable performance. Unless you wanted to play Quake, that is. ;-)

But the integer performance of these chips was rather impressive.

The other problem was that Cyrix CPUs used more power than Intel's, so they generated more heat and therefore needed a better cooling system. PC vendors often used cheap low-end fans that were well-suited for Pentiums, but caused many, many crashes due to the system overheating. Once I replaced the fan with a bigger one, the crash-rate dropped by about 90%.
If they have your name, you're in their system forever and staff can see notes from your stays in the past. Almost guaranteed that if you're a jerk you will be given the worst possible room/car/* on your next visit.
- Buy a ticket to Nigeria $1.5k

- Buy $5k worth of raspberry pi’s

- Spend a month there teaching everyone the basics of what you learned

- Blog and video blog about it.

Come back to NY and get hired right away.

Does anyone see a flaw in any of this?

ps - what’s your race got to do with anything?
>If you classify say 50% of people as AI's and 50% of AI's as people then those AI's passed the Turing test.

And if your version of the test is "heads it's an AI, tails it's human" then any AI's that are classified as human will have "passed the Turing test."
Mark Zuckerberg on Decentralization
Lame article: only points out obvious problems.

The lightning network will allow instantaneous, onion-routed (anonymous) transactions, thus refuting the main points against Bitcoin.

Maybe MySpace would have had a chance to hold its ground if it had known what its problems were.
Why does the XPS keep putting the camera at the base the screen instead the top of where it is on most laptops?
So just to be clear, I'd need to install the OS patch as well as the OEM update (to BIOS? Processor?) in order to mitigate both Meltdown and Spectre.

Additionally, how does this interact with VMs? It makes the most sense to me that I'd need to microcode patch the hosts, but what about the guests?
Excellent images and the more I think about what this could be used for the creepier it gets. One day, truly, software will be very dangerous.
To have a smaller bezel at the top because most of their target audience doesn't use the webcam anyway.
Not sure what you mean by normally executed code. Speculative execution happens in normal everyday conditional code such as if/switch statements, and most loops unless the compiler unrolls them.
No space available there due to infinite display.
NSA?
I think these wide ratios became popular, not because of video but because of ability to ship less screen and still claim to have a certain diagonal size. Saying 13" at 16:9 is much less area than a 3:4 screen at the same diagonal measurement.
yes, my point was explicit use like those described in the articles mentioned. I'm looking for more information and best practices.
this is why we specialize and trust the findings of other experts through published papers and, sometimes, blogs. most people don't individually audit all of the software they run, but people as a whole cover most of it. especially security-critical things.

with closed-source blobs built into the hardware design, nobody can properly audit it.
if I want to exec() something with specific
env vars then I have to go through
/usr/bin/env. Sigh.

Why not use execve[0] to set up a specific environment for child processes?

0 - https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=execve&apropos=0&s...
In a stateless, negotiation-less flow where you have no pre-existing relationship with the other party? Isn't that exactly the bootstrap that PKI was built for?
The problem is that mixing business and law enforcement, so that quotidian commercial transactions become opportunities for criminal investigation, can and historically has lead to unintended consequences.

Quoting from a below comment:

> Replacing "undocumented immigrant" with "jew" or "same-sex couple" or "interracial couple" or "movie torrent pirate"... surely one of those substitutions triggers a reaction in even the most law-and-order out there.

> And most of those categories have been illegal in some states in the US's history.
Sure, sure: I'm not saying you have to go rip anything up right now (unless someone finds a specific vulnerability), but I was trying to eke out what exactly the benefit was :)
The most effective way to getting your first paid users (4 startups)
Active Discussion => https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16070516
So glad I am not the only one with that issue on my 9560.
I also found out that if I put CPU under stress, the whine goes away.
So when I am using the adapter, I run HeavyLoad on 3 cores and that takes whine away, with enough computing power for happy compiling.
There's a global RAM shortage now. 32G would likely put too much of a sticker shock on the price tag.
>
It's much better to say "I'm afraid for the safety and lack of equality and freedom for gay people if being gay is illegal." By focusing on Muslims, you're making it personal and ignoring many non-Muslim countries and religions which have anti-gay beliefs.

No, you're avoiding the root causes because you're afraid to address them, which in turns harms gay people, women, ex-Muslims, atheists and other victims of Islam. Not focusing on Islam- related violence towards gays and women because other violence towards gays and women exists is awful.

> Religion and races

We haven't talked about a single race the entire discussion. Why are you introducing it?

> And as you seem intent on the pizza aspect, pizza isn't a person.

You're right, it's an idea. Let's call people who believe in this idea StuffCrustPizzaLovers. Do you think disliking StuffCrustPizzaLovers is racist?

If I say 'Islam is bad' - since Islam isn't a person - is that now OK according to your rules?

> rather than what you think a group of unique people is all acting out in unison.

Not sure if you're lying or just not reading anything I'm writing, but I'm focusing on what's been measured, as previously discussed, using Muslims' opinion as a primary source. Are you saying think most Muslims are liars?

If you want to stop making the world worse, let people who have the courage to report problems do their jobs without labelling them racist.
Real estate seems to be a common theme amongst people generating wealth.
Generally, Thinkpads are recommended. I think, Red Hat employees all have Thinkpads or something along those lines, which is why they get lots of patches to make things go smoothly. No official support from Lenovo, though.
Progressive Web Apps(pwas) are coming to a safari near you
You are right.

The best approach is to evict all user space pages from cache when an invalid page access happens if the page fault was caused by the software trying to read/write kernel space pages.

Massive performance hit but only to misbehaved software. Normal software will not have the performance hit of the current solution.

Kernel could even switch to unmapped kernel pages solution if too many read/write attempts.
Didi Chuxing, China’s Ride-Hailing Giant, Agrees to Buy Uber Rival in Brazil
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So, read them with another Mac? That's been the case with Apple PCIe SSDs for the past few years, anyway. I mean, at least they're not soldered, I suppose... And yes, the encryption can be disabled. You can choose to have either the new encryption system, FileVault, both (recommended), or neither.
Unless you have vm.overcommit_memory set to 1, then AIUI you can implement malloc s.t. a read/write to the returned memory won't generate a SIGSEGV, e.g. using mmap sans MAP_NORESERVE. Even if vm.overcommit_memory=1, you can still (I assume) do it by simply having your malloc implementation populate each page.

That said, as long as "too small to fail" (https://lwn.net/Articles/627419/) is around (which is presumably "forever"), the oom-killer won't be going away. Fork obviously compounds this massively due to copy-on-write. So ensuring your malloc'd memory is actually writable may just make you a more tempting target for the oom-killer.

> Doesn't ISO C require that if malloc returns a nonzero pointer, it has to backed physically (need not be RAM, could be swap on disk or some other thing)

I don't see anything like that, though admittedly I don't have a "real" copy of the standard. I'd also be at least a little surprised if it were true (though my being surprised by the C standard would...actually not be surprising). While the "spirit of the law" would probably make sense, the "letter of the law" would be difficult. Consider e.g. an otherwise side-effect free function with a statically computable result assuming a successful malloc (and corresponding free), could the compiler optimize away the malloc call?
This one is great, and it definitely emails faster than once per hour.
Where's the fucking USB ports?!? I have literally used or observed zero USB C devices till now. I've seen newer phones but who plugs phones into computers anymore? The main issue is flash drives, external HDDs, mice, keyboards, LTE modems, Kindle, and so on. None of those are available in type C variants and I don't want to be inconvenienced by my new laptop. If I wanted to hurt myself I'd just buy from Apple!
Sometime next year, native apps will start becoming irrelevant for most use cases
Did you look into the Razer Blade series? https://www.razerzone.com/gaming-laptops
I am not sure if "unstable" is the word I would use. Sure, even after training for days the GAN produces not-so-realistic images, but the rate at which it generates those images gradually decreases over the training period and the images get more "realistic".

>How do you solve the 'where to stop' problem if the output is so unstable?

Looking at the discriminator loss would be a good start for that.
95% of new Palestinian detainees in Israel jails are youth
The biggest motivator to move to Intel, as stated by Steve Jobs in 2005 (paraphrasing from what I remember), was that the power to performance ratio was bad on PowerPC. All the lead that PowerPC had had over Intel vanished.

And given that IBM wasn’t interested in servicing Apple’s needs for consumer level chips (and Motorola, the other company in the PowerPC consortium, was struggling to scale up manufacturing), Apple’s pro machines like the PowerMac were struggling to keep up and improve. One PowerMac model with PowerPC G5 (IIRC) was even released with liquid cooling and had some customers complaining about leaks.

The driver for the processor switch was actually Apple’s inability to get the right kind of chips it wanted on scale. As others have mentioned, the in-house design and the ability to get its chips manufactured for iPhones on a large scale triggered a big wave (of competitive advantage) for Apple. We’ll only see more of this as time passes.
You're right.

I was assuming the parent was thinking about Macs vs. Intel processors. Was just pointing out that the comparison of scale is iOS devices vs. Intel processors.
http://raspberrywebserver.com/raspberrypicluster/raspberry-p...
Meltdown in a nutshell
I'm guessing Itanium is not vulnerable.
Most vendors are looking to prolong battery life and increasing RAM will do the exact opposite.

Most software is still 32 bit and can't take advantage of the added memory. Even apps that can still don't really need that much. Workloads requiring gobs are RAM are niche and 8GBs works well for most people.

My personal server with 16GB of RAM runs at around 48% utilization hosting 16 sites, multiple databases, a transcoding media server, and a transcoding DVR. My work issued laptop with 8GB of RAM is running under 75% utilization. My development VM with 6GB of RAM is only running at 75% utilization.

Apart from video editing or data analysis, what sort of workloads would a user be running on a laptop that demand every ounce of RAM you can give them?
Yay Dell! So far I like this series. Coming from years of Macbook laziness and returning to my Linux desktop roots I just bought in to the Dell XPS 15 9560 on sale at Christmas. No regrets thus far, it's nice. However, I don't need 32GB RAM and as I am setting up Gentoo and ZFS root and am very busy (lost two days to flying this week already) I have not yet completed setup, so there may be some iceberg issues... https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Dell_XPS_15_9560
I remember to have read that they shut down the G maps because Google expected them to force users to sign in for the full experience (eg turn-by-turn navigation, which at that time was only featured on android). That was the point at which Apple had to walk away from the deal
Nope I meant what I wrote. Ditching Google for mapping was probably for two reasons: quit giving google data from iOS users using maps, and corollary to that, garner more support from those more security minded.
Insanely cheap? They had to borrow money (as opposed to selling shares) at 5.3% interest last year. Those bonds currently trade at about 5.9% interest (https://www.bondsupermart.com/main/bond-info/bond-factsheet/...)

If they need more money, they would either need a very good story, or pay more interest (“Production pushed back again” is not “a very good story”)

Tesla is a stock that may bring big profits, but that is not without risk.
I was a PA once, and we would call the area we kept the extras as District 9.
>If "the point" in question is some kind of job underrepresentation

Still seeing the forest for the trees.

The point isn't job underrepresentation in meatspace, the point is that the underlying assumptions about gender roles in employment are expressing and reinforcing themselves whenever the English language is written with a determinate gender as in TFA. And that determined gender seems to be disproportionately male to any perceptive reader. This betrays that the forces that engender (pun intended?) discrimination are operating in the writer and are reinforcing the worldviews of those who still hold such prejudices.

The causal relation between using this language and discriminating against women is not a direct one, but it's intellectually dishonest to assume on the flipside that no relation exists in anybody who does habitually use gendered pronouns in their writing.
Folks have been asking what they should be doing about the new exploits
I know you said "dabbling" but it seems like Anaconda is recommended by nearly every guide to ML with Python. What did you stumble across that recommended something else?
My first Dell as developer machine is XPS 15 9560 but it is in no way a developer machine:
- The thunderbolt dock wire out and laptop USB C are on opposite hands. I have to place my laptop on top of the dock like a giant book resting on a brick.

- Awful coil whine on the power adapter.

- Touchpad is annoying to use when clicking moves the finger resulting in wrong place click.

- Had to replace Killer wifi card with Intel's, Dell's support was top notch here.

- If you don't have nails, opening lid can be an unusual experience, especially when laptop is sitting on top of the dock.

Coming from Thinkpad W530 and miss it but our company switched from Lenovo to Dell
reaperducer said it well:

> Considering the number of times US security agencies go to court to force Apple to give them locked up information, fail, and then go to third-parties to extract the information, I'd say we're safe. For now.

Apple has earned their reputation the hard way.
That price changes dynamically at some interval, and is discounted against the trading market value, correct?
Yea sorry about that - I opened sourced everything a long time ago for anyone to take and relaunch it.

https://github.com/rkalla/hnnotify

Just went from coding all day long to managing an organization and having a family... my side projects were completely starved for attention .
The attacks require co-scheduling with the address space (thread/process) to be attacked. So, exclusive process affinity is a working mitigation against these attacks and other per-core micro-architectural attacks.
And it my understanding that, soon gene therapy will be selecting which bits to flip and flipping them. It still needs testing, feedback, etc, but it isn't the same as going through a full development cycle. Am I wrong?
This ridiculous double-speak is just their lawyers attempting to minimize exposure to claims for replacement processors due to not performing to specifications.
I'm not. I usually use Tippecanoe [https://github.com/mapbox/tippecanoe] to create vector tiles with my data on, and then pick a set of raster tiles from here [http://leaflet-extras.github.io/leaflet-providers/preview/] (the Stamen ones are very nice, and also the ESRI ones are gorgeous but need you to have an ESRI license) for background and labels.
> IMO, it does not make sense to buy any of those new models: whether it's Dell, HP, or else--before we see models with 32Gb of RAM. It's been told here over and over since 2016 when first Touchbar MacBook got released.

What are you doing on an Ultrabook that actually needs 32GB of RAM? Even on my work laptop (Macbook Pro, 16GB), I pretty much never have issues that would be addressed by having 32GB of RAM.

(Note: Just because toph/htop/etc. show >16GB of data in memory, that doesn't necessarily mean your workload would be noticeably impacted if you were limited to 16GB of RAM.)
This is a relatively common pattern I've come across over the years. Often used with translation files by people who are not coders. Sanity checking them in a pre-commit hook can be useful.
No. I find Razer as a company to appeal to the "x-treme gamer" set in ways I wouldn't want to support, but I also think their branding is childish and would not walk into a meeting with a client with that huge gross logo on it. It would look bad.

I'd rather get a laptop with no branding at all, but the Alienware logo is at least really small. (And the keyboard on the Alienware 13 is good, my brother has one.)
> and then suddenly someone discovered fire

This is not really like that. The dangers of speculative execution were known before, and, separately, the processor itself provided memory isolation capabilities. That the processor would ignore its own memory isolation principles when speculating about the next instruction to execute is a critical base of these vulnerabilities.
Ask HN: Is there any opensource implementation of Twitter Rainbird?
LA slowly transforms into an actual city.
You're linking a minimal manual which is required for corporate deployment, hardly anything Apple is being forthcoming about. I'm pretty sure you and I have different definitions of acceptable disclosure - unless Apple makes the entire chip possible to audit, I don't consider it to be acceptable.
By normal I mean code that wasn't predicted. Predicted code execution is "abnormal" because it might not contribute to the final result.

My question is why is predicted code exploitable and why is unpredicted code not exploitable? Both are executed, both have values written to registers, what's going on?

Apologies for the noobness of this question.
Some experiments by "cyborgs" are relevant... I remember that one of them added to himself "a sensor that detected Earth's magnetic field."

https://www.wired.com/2007/04/esp/

and it seems the experiment has been updated:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/06/first-hum...

“As we walk down the street there’s radiation, X-rays, infrared and ultraviolet, as well as the electromagnetic field of the planet. So we want to create new senses to become aware of our environment.”

and

Harbisson, who is colourblind, has an ‘eyeborg’ that allows him to “hear” the light spectrum (including infrared and ultraviolet), while Ribas has a sensor in her elbow that vibrates when an earthquake occurs anywhere in the world.
Do you think the periodic table contains all the elements in the universe?
Not OP, but I got the X1 Carbon, which was (at the time) their top-of-the-line Ultrabook and believed to be their most Linux-compatible laptop.

I had a number of issues with the Thinkpad that were all relatively minor in and of themselves, but overall, I ended up switching back to the XPS 13, and I plan on sticking with this line.
Major chip flaws affect billions of devices
Thanks for clarifying. The concepts are actually straightforward if I'm not being too lazy to check my assumptions!