skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
High prices yes, slow internet no.

It's no longer true that the US lags behind on Internet access speeds.

The US is ranked #10 in the world in average Internet access speeds, just barely behind Denmark and Japan. The countries that rank in front of the US are mostly tiny population wise. We're far faster than eg France, or Australia. Competitively, US access speeds have improved substantially in the last ten years.

Here's who ranks in front of the US: South Korea, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Hong Kong, Finland, Switzerland, Singapore, Japan.

Here is who the US ranks in front of: Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Russia, Brazil, China, Mexico, Taiwan, New Zealand, India, Indonesia, Netherlands, Romania, Britain, Czech, Belgium, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Poland, Italy, Greece, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia - and all of Africa + all of Latin America.

The US has 2x the average access speeds of Italy, and neary 2x the speeds of France.

Within 24 to 36 months, the US will likely pass Japan on average access speeds.

This is a massive improvement over where the US was ten years ago and it's getting better faster than most countries.

The US ranks #8 on percentage of connections above 15mbps (48%), just behind Sweden and in front of Denmark. The US ranks #10 on percentage above 25mbps, with dramatically faster growth in that segment than anyone else in the top 10. Between Q1 2016 and Q1 2017, the US saw a 65% leap in % of connections over 25mbps; Finland, ranked #9, by comparison saw a 31% improvement.

So not only is the US killing it on access speeds now, particularly for a massive country of 330 million people, it's improving far faster than most other comparable nations.
I think Spectre and the JS PoC are actually the ones applicable to any modern processors (including AMDs, ARMs and probably most other chip vendors). Looks like the mitigations for these will be directly included in the browser.

EDIT : I don't even think we know of a way to fix Spectre in the kernel...
Which is why you 1) want to ask, 2) default to "no", and 3) explain that the request is both unusual and potentially harmful.

The option to blacklist an app from such requests should also be present.

If the app itself absolutely cannot perform some function w/o high-precision timing, that becomes its problem to communicate to the user.

I've made a practice of denying application permissions, and deleting apps that make such requests. I'm moving to deleting Android entirely, which has proved overall to be a poorly-performing and functioning virus and attack vector, at cognitive, social, economic, political, and other levels. Also, frequently, software.
ffmpeg works great on ARM. I don't know if the PPC port is all that optimized lately.
You can hate whatever pizza you want
I'm curious, do you have any suggestions for reading on designing microservices while explicitly dealing with network chattiness? It seems like that can be a major issue.

For instance, if you have your microservices setup in the cloud, AWS/Azure/GCP, and have your microservice domains on their own servers network chattiness can easily cause issues with billing and service responsiveness if business logic regularly deals with multiple domains.
He was probably worried about the backlash by attendees and his security.
> I'm a jaded Atlassian user who believes they buy competition and then stagnant the product's evolution.

What product do you think Atlassian has bought to stifle it's evolution? Bitbucket specifically was a product with 50k users and Atlassian has grown it to Millions. Buying a competitor just to let the product stagnate and die makes rarely sense in business.
Most web apps are unlikely to need high-precision timers. For games, however, Date.now() offers only millisecond resolution, which can make it occasionally inadequate.
A lot of companies do, including many ycombinator startups. Think of anything that's analytics, data science, data warehouse or advertising related. The costs to run their service just took a hit.
They're definitely world class, but they're also loud about it. Consider that other teams perhaps have a different model. For instance, Microsoft's internal team surely finds lots of clever bugs that never get talked about in Microsoft products.
0

Literally anything he has done is by definition not impossible.

He has done at least 2 very difficult things but let's engage in a discourse grounded in reality please.
Observable Universe contains 10x more galaxies than previously thought (2016)
ReCurta: Our goal is to build the first Curta calculator since 1972 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16035091
My Father's Body, at Rest and in Motion
The Best Product Person of 2017 Is
I'm developing a website that will require somewhat high frequency timing to account for network latency but I think standard getTime is accurate enough with millisecond accuracy which I think will satisfy my requirements (I still need to test this though).

I can't think of something that needs microsecond level timing though.
That, the drm stuff, the spying, and the lack of innovation. Amd's more-cores approach really appealed to me.
Pretty hard to have a neighbor vm execute Spectre on your same physical server if you have dedicated hardware.

Add in that Spectre specifically is a js bug so in order to be vulnerable your server would need to execute untrusted JavaScript and I think we can assume the threat surface of this specific bug is smaller outside the cloud...
I can't understand this paragraph from [1]:

> Cloud providers which use Intel CPUs and Xen PV as virtualization without having patches applied. Furthermore, cloud providers without real hardware virtualization, relying on containers that share one kernel, such as Docker, LXC, or OpenVZ are affected.

I take it to imply that hypervisors that use hardware virtualization are not affected. However, the PoC that reads host memory from a KVM guest seems to contradict this.

Is it because on Xen HVM, KVM, and similar hypervisors, only kernel pages are mapped in the address space of the VM thread (so a malicious VM cannot read memory of other VMs), but on these other hypervisors, pages from other containers are mapped? Yet the Xen security advisory [2] says:

> Xen guests may be able to infer the contents of arbitrary host memory,
including memory assigned to other guests.

Relatedly, what sensitive information other than passwords could appear in the kernel memory? I'd expect that at the very least buffers containing sensitive data pertaining to other VMs may be leaked.

[1] https://meltdownattack.com/
[2] https://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/advisory-254.html
Google is about to force you to use its new Calendar design
If you try to define all Christians as X, you're probably mistaken.

If it's a negative definition designed to insult then it's probably discrimination.

The whole point of being anti racism, anti religious discrimination etc., is that race and religion are not good qualifiers for making assumptions or decisions.
Malicious Website Cryptominers from GitHub
FunFair can finish what Satoshi started
Show HN: A Group Chat app for all your events
Especially for Google's Project Zero.
Their diversion into products like Zagat, is a huge invition to anti-trust scrutiny, while providing barely any business benefit versus their core.

They made the same mistake most platform tech monopolies do, they started eating the ecosystem they were providing food for. Microsoft did the same thing, aggressively, for 10-15 years, during the peak of the Windows will rule the world era. Their behavior on that front only slowed down once the seriousness of the anti-trust actions became clear.

Google will likely begin moving about the landscape much more carefully, ditching small businesses that make them look particularly bad as a monopoly, due to the anti-trust hammers being swung around that are trying to land on them.
So a quick question. What is the alternative to SharedArrayBuffer? One of the web applications i work on use it a fair amount. Is our app now just going to break?
Almost as disgusting as Intel's response.

> "It is important to note that this method is dependent on malware running locally which means it's imperative for users to practice good security hygiene by keeping their software up-to-date and avoid suspicious links or downloads."

If you're running something on your ARM CPU, it's running locally!, they're using careful language to make the problem seem to impact them less than it does and lay the blame on the user.

This affects a huge number of processors out there, not just in phones and tablets but in embedded, industrial and network devices - many of which will never seem workarounds from their OS / software for the hardware fault.

Also OH: "The bug doesn’t happen if you don’t use our product"
I wonder if we will ever see a bug dangerous enough to cause clouds to shut down so many machines that it is impossible to get the word out about a fix.
Yeah, you shouldn't be allowed to threaten someone based on their political beliefs either.

Or just don't threaten people period.
> Bigotry is not a reasonable attitude, and you can't reason someone out of an attitude they didn't reason themselves into in the first place.

you don't need to convince every single person. that's unrealistic for basically any position.

it also seems to me that 'bigot' is on the road to becoming a thought-terminating cliche (if it isn't that already). it's seems like a label some slap on others they disagree with so that they can 'free themselves' of understanding the mechanics of the other position; even as doing so provides the tools to better counteract it.

some people do (poorly) 'reason' themselves into bad ideas, even 'the good guys'. often it's because of bad or incomplete data, incorrect assumptions, or one of the increasingly well known logical fallacies we see on a site like yourlogicalfallacyis.com.
I see no difference. Surely your slaves may refuse to work if they decide that it's in their own interest; refuse to eat, perhaps, and spurn threats of torture and death, until you have no choice but to be done with them. I think it merely a matter of the strength of their conviction, that their interest lies not in survival, but in the refusal of subjugation.

By your logic, the employee is only ever free when possessed of the freedom to serve some other, instead, at their own discretion; insofar as doubt, a paucity of jobs, the risk of losing health coverage and the like might erode their confidence in this ability, you would regard them as being in chains. Thus it must be that it is with the risks presented by the unknown, that they find their interest lies; elsewise, none of them would ever be free without a job offer in hand.
Apple adds a Siri-powered news briefing to the latest iOS beta
I hesitate to ask, but as a former Greyhound traveller, am I misreading, or is this author simply suggesting that Megabus become more like Greyhound?
Hardly passive-aggressive. What would the alternative have been? Leave PTI on on AMD just out of sympathy for Intel?!
They're a nice source of mathematically justifiable entropy.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/seekingalpha.com/amp/article/41...
It'd be nice if that were a separate package instead of an excuse.
That's Linus. But he's not wrong on this one. If anything he's restrained.
White paper direct link as the site seems to be under heavy load: https://developer.arm.com/-/media/Files/pdf/Cache_Speculatio...
You had to stretch so far for that it's meaningless. You can't equate physical restraint, corporal punishment, and complete lack of self determination in your personal life with... the risk of losing your health coverage.

That's not a difference in degree at all. It's a difference in kind, and the distinction isn't even close.
Yeah I was thinking one of the steps after the first one should probably mention a. :P The example clarified, but it looks like the steps might be both simpler and more clear by writing the formulas for each step.
James Dyson always strikes me as a solid modern representation of just how difficult it is to actually invent (or re-invent) something new, very useful and commercially successful. He went through hundreds of variations and major prototypes on the vacuum cleaner over 5+ years. Even after he got a product he could commercialize, it took another 10-15 years to make it really take off. He spent two decades just to get the business to a point of true sustaining success, while fending off a global swath of well funded competitors at every price tier and quality.
For an accurate double pendulum you almost certainly need a symplectic integrator---not just Euler's method---or risk numerical instabilities that come from nonconservation of energy.
What is bug free? CPUs work just fine. There is no bug.

The question is did anyone receive performance assurance from Intel? Probably not.

Some cloud providers or compute grids just lost a lot. Maybe they will find an angle to claim compensation.
USB Password Theft TechyTalk.online
> All future Arm Cortex processors will be resilient to this style of attack or allow mitigation through kernel patches.

Lol, 'we may or may not fix our HDL.'
A Neuroscientist Explores the “Sanskrit Effect”
I doubt it'll happen. They already went the other way, it used to be 90 days, now it's just 7.
Perhaps this is covered by the "crude hacks" category, but I'm reminded of the story of how the wheel was lost in Arabia. Technology doesn't necessarily provide a marginal improvement.

http://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/197303/why.they.lost.th...
That is an absolutely fascinating and perspective-altering idea, thanks for sharing the link.

The inability to get a quiet room alone is my personal vision of hell, but I suppose that if I literally never had the experience of a quiet room to myself, I wouldn't miss it. I wonder if this is like language learning... much easier if you're immersed in it from birth, than trying to adapt later in life.
Xamarin.Forms is cool but still doesn't work on Linux so it seems the same story as XAML to me - cool but of little use, unlike to HTML which is less cool but absolutely useful as it works everywhere. JavaFX - doesn't work on mobiles/tablets (there was a prototype in 2011, seemingly abandoned), sadly it seems to be about as dead as Flash and Silverlight now. As for QML - search results suggest it works everywhere but still hardly a popular choice for some reason, worth taking a closer look perhaps (but I still doubt it can compare to HTML as using Qt means producing binary builds for every platform to support AFAIK).
Sure, but it feels a little funny in one way to say that people "know" all of its output, although I'd agree that for other purposes being able to write a program to generate something is a relatively good description of what it means to understand it.
Having used both, I'd say that AWS has a lot more "stuff" (services) and they tend to be more scalable and practical. Google tends to create fewer services that are (generally) rock-solid with some gems like BigQuery.

Fun Anecdote time:

6 months ago I needed 100 GPU machines for a bunch of batch processing.

I called my Google rep and contacted AWS and Azure at the same time.

Google struggled to give me enough instances and was only able to provide 10 at the time, with more on the way in other regions...

However, their GCE wouldn't let me create an autoscaling group with GPU instances. Their tooling simply didn't support it. After much hassling their support centers, my rep informed me they simply didn't support it yet, and he recommended I use AWS.

Azure never responded to my inquiries. Their UI and tooling is pretty lame too, and the service is expensive.

AWS increased my quota quickly and it worked great. Their support tends to be responsive if brief and biased towards making the problem go away by giving you what you want.
Sounds like you have a good source of information; any chance you can share pointers? Thanks! Apologies if I missed this in upstream posts.
Your first-year-philosophy-student contrarian argument is cute, but it's pretty obvious that the grandmother can only gain 10-15 years out of the liver, whereas a newborn can gain an entire lifetime. Getting a transplant is about extending life. Choosing someone where longevity is maximized makes the most sense from a medical standpoint.

Obviously it's also chosen based on moral "merit" where cases are less clear-cut -- say a 40-year-old rapist on death row vs. a 40-year-old family man and pastor. Again though, it's pretty obvious that a coin-flip isn't any good. Most people would choose the latter over the former.
I mean things claimed to be impossible.
It looks like SharedArrayBuffer was released in July 2017 in Chrome and August 2017 in Firefox [1], so I think it's new enough that almost any non-internal website using it would need a fallback anyway. So my impression is it's not quite as nuclear as other web technologies being disabled, but still pretty bad.

I personally used it for a experimental hackathon project in April (in Chrome Canary, behind a flag), and I believe it was necessary for one of the aspects of the project, so it's a shame to see it disabled, but my impression is it's more "future web tech" than "the way the web works today".

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
But that doesn't explain its popularity; other ideas are simpler than fascism and don't spread.
Fascist leaders gain an audience because they address concerns which their opponents (liberal globalists) won't bring up, for fear of alienating their own support base. Fascism may not be the right solution, but dismissing its supporters as too simple-minded to understand complex ideas doesn't help advance a better alternative.
There are actually several different laws involved here. The newest one is the NetzDG [1] (network enforcement act), that requires all reports of illegal content to be checked within 24 hours. The incentive structure is messed up because there are fines for failure to delete illegal content, but none for unjustified deletion. So the barrier was shifted from "obviously illegal" to "not obviously legal". The quotes in the Reuters article are all about that aspect of the law and of Twitter's enforcement.

The other laws that are involved here have been essentially unchanged for a long time and are not really controversial. They are just a bit more subtle than a random Twitter censor is going to appreciate, because they are intended for consideration by a judge. Under these laws, you can absolutely insult everyone equally, and Volksverhetzung is equally illegal, no matter which group it is directed against.

Edit: [1] The German text of the NetzDG is here: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/netzdg/BJNR335210017.html
You're a BMW enthusiast, though.. Of course you'd choose the Z3, haha.

But they really aren't in the same class. Z3's are tourers, not sports cars per se'. But then again, MX-5's are roadsters, not sports cars in the practical sense. They don't exist in the same market bracket and fulfil entirely different ownership purposes :)

My personal opinion however, after finally settling on a NA mx-5 for my weekend race car, is that the mx-5 is honestly one of the best bang-for-buck circuit cars you can get. With only ~$10k invested in mine, it happily outpaces cars 6-10x the value.
Weinstein is famous for this I think, and is mentioned in "The Quants".

Didn't know Thiel was so exceptional at the game.

Surprised to not see anyone from Two Sigma given their support for chess.

Also SIG strikes me as a place known for recruting M:tG players
Bondi Scrubs
Just to clarify, in this case p = 77,232,917 is prime, but for Mersenne primes in general p is just a positive integer.
I would describe much of AWS and the supporting tooling as "ugly", sometimes hideously ugly, but the services tend to work well.

They clearly prioritize making things work over making them pleasant to use.

AWS Lambda Mapping Templates and S3 Bucket Policy are two things that come to mind as hideously ugly. But they work!
> again, where is it getting this infinite storage and processing capacity

I agree with most all of your points. On that one, about where its resources are to come from (and thinking just in a fantastical manner on the topic): it's going to trade with humans, who will provide the things it needs to keep growing. For example, give people a 'free' search engine, that they find highly useful, which results in the humans funding the AI through ads/clicks, allowing for massive expansion of the AI infrastructure. You could apply the general concept to most any service an AI could provide. I'll give you this, you give me that, resulting in a dependency, with both sides occasionally trying to seize on an opening to acquire the upperhand in the arrangement.

Simply put, humans will trade with AI eventually. It's inevitable, and it's a critical aspect of how AI will self-expand. To ensure their own survival, they'll want to become so useful to humans that the humans don't kill (or try to kill) the AI, despite occasionally (or frequently) being afraid of its power / potential.

Want to build out the colonies in the US? You're going to trade with the British Empire and France, while trying not to piss off either enough that they destroy you (or try to). You want to be useful to them, enrich them, limit the extent to which you seem to pose a threat. You maintain an even keel until the point where you are no longer subservient. China has been a master at that the last 40 some years, they still behave that way today when it suits their long-term aims (playing down their strength at times, or playing it up at other times). As a concept, I think this represents a power dynamic that is universal between most living (aware, sentient, whatever) things, and the human-AI relationship will also play out that way.
وظائف الخليج اليوم 4/1/2018
Bondi Scrubs on blogger
Fork is not my favourite syscall
PlayStation 3 clustering
One mile outside of Longmont's service area I get 1/10th of the speed for $80.
ARM advisory [1] does state that Cortex-A75 is vulnerable to variant 3 (Meltdown).

[1] https://developer.arm.com/support/security-update
I see. Thanks.

I do have some PC systems but they are shared among family members, making it difficult to run BOINC as a background task without interfering with their work.

I'll look at low-cost systems, like the Raspberry Pi, to see if I can use them as dedicated BOINC boxes instead.
Well, sounds like that time when there is no water left but there are still beers in the fridge.

At least we can play our sorrows away.
MSNBC and CNN both tried to go hardcore conservative and out-Fox Fox briefly around the same time many years back, both lost ratings and failed to dent Fox when they did.

I'm not sure there's a market here; the demand for a conservative cable news network has a strong tribal identity with Fox News.
The antidote to greed is more greed. Brilliant.
If I were a betting man, I'd place my bet on them knowing about this for a long time, and possibly even being behind the bugs' introduction in the first place
Computer security, what a nightmare. If governments backdoors were illegal to implement, that would help a little...
Another regular rider here who often uses the system outside of rush hour. And it has gotten way worse after Sandy. People keep saying that it's not so bad during rush hour, as if we shouldn't expect a 9pm ride to be any better than a stressful crapshoot. I don't get why we should have such low standards.
My understanding is that it's not a bug of unintended behaviour, but rather a problem with the specification, all behaviour is as intended, but we need to have different behaviour. Which means that basically we need to get a new ISA -- or a new version of an existing one -- and transition everything to it.
sysctl -w kernel.unprivileged_bpf_disabled=1

I use eBPF all the time, but I never use it as non-root, so I haven't needed unprivileged bpf anyway.

update: that eBPF vector was already fixed, and another safety measure is already being considered https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/1/3/895
TIL that Google owns Zagat
And this is why running arbitrary software from people you've never heard of will always suck more.