skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> One could flip your argument and say defining life as purely organic is a failure of imagination.

That's right! So how would you define life? Or the meta-question, why bother? We gain nothing from figuring out what's "alive" and what has "merely" a rich complexity.

"Search for life" is a category error.

> The thing about searching for "life" over "intelligence" is that life doesn't necessarily need to be intelligent for it to be interesting.

If something is interesting, why do we care if it's "life?"

Anything we find is likely to operate on some scale vastly different than what we're familiar with. We won't even agree on whether it's alive.

> Whereas when you're visiting a planet, you can observe a wider scope of life as it need not be intelligent (as we can perceive anyway) for markers to be identified.

My hope is we'll find markers that are clearly weird and that aren't evidence of life but maybe something more and weirder that we don't understand.

Isn't that even more interesting? Why hope to find life, when we know life is already possible?
A nice trick with Focus on iOS is that you can set it to be the adblocker for mobile Safari. So, you install it, but don’t have to switch browsers to partially benefit from it.

There are apparently paid adblockers that route your web requests for all apps through a VPN. Personally, I’m not interested in any aspect of that last sentence. Filtering just Safari locally for free is good for me.

I’ve been against adblockers on the grounds that ads finance the content I want. But lately, ads and trackers have become so egregious on mobile that they, for practical purposes, prevent me from reading content at all. Either the content takes forever to load, or it jumps erratically around the screen for minutes or I’m put off from visiting a political or product related page because of the trackers.

With Focus, the web is usable again! Unfortunately, it’s not financially viable. I’m hopeful for the Brave browser for that. I’ll be trying it soon.
Difficulty to exploit is easy once you have the exploit running. Writing a new exploit is really hard, otherwise we wouldn't be starting 2018 with these news.
I have mixed feelings about emacs starter kits. On the one hand I'm always happy that more people might discover emacs. It's quite simply the most powerful text editor out there. Hands down. I could not imagine using a computer seriously without emacs.

On the other hand, the power of emacs comes from the fact that it's essentially a lisp interpreter which is good at doing text editor stuff. If you abstract this away then what you get is an editor which is implemented in emacs, but is ultimately comparable to any other text editor.

Emacs really shines when you make it your own. And that goes far beyond the usual "customisation" that you see. I have files full of macros that help me write lisp which eventually changes the way the editor works. And some of that functionality helps me write the macros that help me write lisp that (...and so on).

For those that don't use emacs the above might sound bizarre. Maybe it's only attractive to a few programmers. Or maybe you have to try it before you really understand. I don't know. But that's why I have mixed feelings.
> The cost to taxpayers would be many times the benefit to taxpayers for something like this

Really? Do you know how expensive supporting braille is? Accessibility requirements for software? Fitting a blind person's house out with accessible features? Providing public services and transit for the blind? Income support?

All of these things are costs absorbed by society, which you cover one way or another (e.g. taxes, additional costs in products & services etc.).

Being blind is a major disability, the lifetime cost to society of a single blind person is many multiples of 425k per eye.

> The best way for more medical innovation like this is for it to be expensive at first. Over time, competition and demand drives prices down. Pretty much all the medical technology we now take for granted was only accessible to the rich at first.

What?? What if there are no rich blind people competing for this care? How is the cost going to come down then?
Check out qbrt, a gecko app runtime by a mozilla engineer

https://github.com/mozilla/qbrt

I really hope it sees more development
What's a Principle Engineer?
RUBY VS GOLANG COMPARISON: WHICH IS THE BEST SOLUTION?
It's very frustrating. I don't think Tim Cook actually uses computers that much.
Java? If it got one thing going for it, it is maturity.
This article has some good insights into why that is and why previous studies have been biased.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/the-irr...

tldr: Most people who respond to surveys asking about the efficacy of the program are sober and skew the results, the anonymity of people in programs makes it difficult to identify who are potential candidates for study/surveys for external researchers, and no central authority monitoring programs so little standardisation between them meaning some groups may be more effective than others (this is somewhat reflected in a comment above about trying other groups which may mean that the real effectiveness comes from the community it brings, not the program itself, but that's pure speculation on my part)
I wonder why more devs who are transitioning from javascript don't simply build a shell native app with a webview in it? UWP or .NET with a webview uses a lot less RAM than electron to do the same thing. I haven't run tests on MacOS but I bet Cocoa and Swift could do the same thing
The product would not have been possible 20 years ago as the fans would have konked out due to the heat, and the plastic would have yellowed and gone brittle also due to the heat.

So we needed materials science improvements to make the product viable. I don't think I was advocating for low hanging fruit but instead progress in various fields allow other things to be invented, some of them I guess become low hanging fruit.
Xcode is about as native as you can get (developed by the same company as the OS!), yet it becomes more sluggish with each new version. I think the real problem is product managers focusing too heavily on "shiny new features" and less on efficiency/stability, which is mystifying since these are all dev tools, after all.
> However Microsoft's APIs are not "more stable" than Apple's

You can pretty much always run apps for Windows XP (released 2001) on Windows 10. You can't run any apps from OS X 10.0 (released the same year) on modern macOS. Yes, there was a processor architechture change in there (and a subsequently dropped compatibility layer), but the APIs have changed enough that that isnt the main issue.
M4.5 Earthquake, Berkeley, CA
I don't believe for a second that nobody came up with this idea before. I believe that nobody until now had the motivation to spend the time actually trying to confirm that it's a problem by developing a PoC. Most people would have given up on the idea simply because CPU vendors are not expected to make such a fundamental mistake.
Linux Will End Up Disabling X86 PTI for AMD Processors
Spectre doesn't let u do cross VM memory reading, Meltdown does, AFAIK. If you want to read other VMs memory, u need to RUN in those VMs yourself and within the right process.

So cloud instance and bare metal ones are equally vulnerable under Spectre: as long as they can transfer their malicious code to your VMs and runs it. Can't really see how bare metal servers mitigate this problem.
Also IIRC ... colour cast was one of the things you could adjust on the internals of a CRT: like some sort of collar or potentiometer on the green gun ... how I didn't kill myself messing around with CRTs before I knew better, I don't know.

If you have one be sure you know how to be safe before opening it - deathly voltages inside!
After years of using other people's configs, I found that they never really fit my way of working completely and they're filled with things I don't understand and/or don't use. I think most people will want to use their own configs after a while, and that's one of emacs's greatest strengths. Nowadays we have multiple package repositories and multiple ways of configuring it to suit your tastes.

I also find the description filled with buzzwords and buzz-phrases to the point where it becomes meaningless.
Hi there! Cierge is an OpenID Connect server that handles user signup, login, profiles, management, social logins, and more. Instead of storing passwords, Cirege uses magic links/codes and external logins to authenticate your users.

You can find a good list of FAQs on our our GitHub page or try a demo here: https://cierge.azurewebsites.net
There are tons of new inventions happening every day. People do new things only for themselves. What is impeded is bringing these to mass market due to markets being concentrated in few hands.
That is surprisingly fast compared to standard Firefox for Android. Is there any downside to using this as the default browser?
I assume the NSA finds and quietly stockpiles some very clever vulnerabilities, too.
Healthcare is essential. Either you pay for the healthcare through taxes, or society does in some other way. The some other way that the US has implemented is to put layers bureaucracy of insurance and artificial "market choices" on top of the care, which removes all inefficiencies and inflates the cost dramatically.

Of course the alternative is to leave people with health conditions out on the street and just ignore them, which does seem to be a common occurrence in the US
This might be limited by what the sum total real capability is of the entire vision system. An eye that can receive extra wavelengths is useless without the Neurons that can perceive and project into our conscious mind. To imagine injecting viruses that will change the genetics of the brain is a major leap of discomfort.
Take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

Note that code blocks are painful to read on mobile so don't overuse it on text with ridiculously long lines.
UWP apps can be written in HTML/JS. You can run local js / html in a webview in most platforms. React Native is pretty much just this. It's a shame there isn't a cross-platform framework using webviews and native frameworks.
It's an arms race, there will always be new ways of exploiting this flaw in unexpected ways unless speculation is disabled entirely on existing CPUs.
>warning controversial hypothesis

Prior to 1790, Clark asserts that man faced a Malthusian trap: new technology enabled greater productivity and more food, but was quickly gobbled up by higher populations.

In Britain, however, as disease continually killed off poorer members of society, their positions in society were taken over by the sons of the wealthy. In that way, according to Clark, less violent, more literate and more hard-working behaviour - middle-class values - were spread culturally and biologically throughout the population. This process of "downward social mobility" eventually enabled Britain to attain a rate of productivity that allowed it to break out of the Malthusian trap.
How to make a marketing mix
It would be interesting to know whether any Itanium processors ever suffered from these (now disclosed) bugs.
Love how this Wikipedia link appeared in "new" before the official news article.
Worse, no mitigation will ever be complete against Spectre, unless flat out disabling speculation across memory loads.
No, he means Swift and Objective-C. That's what was, is and will be supported.

On the other hand, Microsoft's API screw-ups are legendary at this point... not even they know what developers should use for Windows apps. I think Windows Phone was recently canceled, so that simplifies things a bit.

And even if there was such a blessed SDK/language combination, they'd probably drop it or rename it next year ;-)
What are the "architecture differences" that make AMD CPUs immune to the 3rd variant (Rogue Data Cache Load, aka Meltdown)?
How a Single Engineer Used Varnish to Build Tesla a Private CDN (2016)
> Well, they may chose to spend more money on specialized chips they earlier have thought of as risky. But the whole risk considerations are now out of the window. You never got fired for buying from IBM and then Intel. Now Intel lost the magic touch and is just one among others. That will affect their pricing power big time - check out their pricing history over the past years and you notice some strong tendency for functional pricing which is an indication of near monopoly pricing power. Expect profits to dive.

I expect a firesale in current and possibly next gen Intel processors. They have a healthy margin that should not exist. I want at least a 20% possibly 30% price cut across the board for all Intel processors.

Oh and I expect the CEO to go to prison for a long, long time. Anything that does not involve at least five years in prison sends a wrong message to board rooms everywhere.
However, since it seems like there is not much anyone can do to identify what is being leaked and what process did it, this does increase the risk that someone might exploit this internally and get away with it.
My attempt, assuming that the books only contain one character each:

The librarian has a list of books you're not allowed to take out. You request one of those books (book X), but it takes a while for search to run to see whether you're allowed to or not. While you're waiting, you say "actually, I'm not really interested in taking out book X, but if the content of that book is 'a', I'd like to take out book Y. If the content of that book is 'b', I'd like to take out book Y+1, and so on".

The librarian is still waiting for the search to complete to see if you can take out book X, but doesn't have anything better to do, so looks inside it, sees that the letter is 'b', and goes and gets book Y+1 so she can hand it over to you.

Now, the original check to see if you can take the first book out completes, and the librarian says "I'm sorry, I can't let you have book X, and I can't give you the book I fetched that you are allowed to take out, otherwise you'd know the content of the forbidden book."

Now, you request book 'Y', which you are allowed. The librarian goes away for a few minutes, and returns with book 'Y', and hands it over to you. You request book 'Y+1', and she hands it over immediately. You request book 'Y+2', and she goes away for a few minutes again, and hands it over.

You now know that Y+1 was (probably) the book she fetched when you made the forbidden request, and therefore that the letter inside the forbidden book was 'b'.
This is like the grand daddy of equifax in sheer numbers :(
MachineLabs strikes deal with Shopware
Inventions are motivated by problems, and we still have lots of them. We sorely need cheap sustainable energy, cheap drugs, artificial organs, more efficient transportation, denser batteries, and that's just stuff off the top of my head. Some of that stuff will entail using existing technology, buy much of it will require new inventions.

Many ideas that seem easy to invent only seem so in retrospect. The article repeatedly points out that inventing rope isn't obvious.
The best way for more medical innovation like this is for it to be expensive at first

That's a bold assertion, and you haven't supported it with an argument.

What about diseases of poverty in the third world? Is the best way of getting medical innovation here by making the cures expensive? The trouble with this kind of thinking is that it (a) conflates the value of an intervention with the price it can command, which is most problematic when it (b) requires large upfront payments and cannot efficiently aggregate or amortize costs over time.

Here's some food for thought for a different approach: prizes. If there were funds made available to pay a prize for working cures, drugs, etc. for medical problems, it could replace patents as a reward mechanism and permit market behaviour to increase the efficiency via generics and widespread application directly, rather than needing exclusivity and high prices for a long period. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prizes_as_an_alternative_to_pa...
Discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16066968
They treated the whole frontmacs as a package and put it on https://elpa.frontside.io/ , I don't know whether it's good idea. Actually I proposaled the same concept for spacema\
cs, doesn't got approved back then. So this is not a starter kit I guess?
JD.com’s Richard Liu Decodes the Chinese Consumer
Free essay writing
Except for comments.
Thx a lot for including sublime in the benchmarks - i gotta admit I switched from sublime to atom quite a while ago, knowing I'm trading performance for comfort with the large ecosystem around Atom.

But i still kept Sublime installed for handling large files, which would mostly horribly crash Atom or take ages to open.

Spending a lot of time designing it's quite some work to keep up with the technology I'm coding for already, so getting to know vim more in depth always felt a bit overwhelming. So the takeaway for me here is clearly to go back to Sublime, I didn't realize how dramatic the performance difference is in the end and am often feeling itchy waiting up for a lagging Atom on larger projects...
As a general fileditor, it may be scary, yes. But I have this in IntelliJ and love it. Saving is just a useless keystroke for most of my development time. Things are in VCS, and if not, I can also use local history to roll back.
> "Ethicalness", however, nobody seems to care about measuring.

I would add that it is not entirely their job. After all, all the stakeholders have a primary goal, the infrastructure engineer will maximise infrastructure metrics, the VC their own and so do regulators, who society does need, even in our angelic brogrammer society.
Wasn't there someone on HN a while ago saying that Focus was built on WebKit which makes it basically a Google thing?
Your whole reasoning is based on marble counting.
A better question is were the people capable of doing the research working on the right problem, or should their talents have been applied to different problems?
Once there is a 'cure', of course it should be handed out to everyone that can benefit from it.
I have been using Firefox focus for a while and I have 2 main problems with it. The adblocker is worse than ublock origin (eg. try to google Kindle) and there is no simple way to use tabs. I still use it to open links, but a lot of the time I end up having focus open it on Firefox.
Incidentally I enabled this yesterday because I was grtting tired of “Congraulation! You won an Amazon gift card!”. I feel the loading speed has improved since. I am not sure how effective Focus will be against popups but let’s see...

1. Search “Safari” on the phone under “Settings”

2. Find “Content Blockers”

4. Choose “Focus”

If you don’t see “Focus” in the list, or if you want to configure “Focus”, open the “Focus” app, and click on the settings icon (top right corner).

Note if the site you are trying to read is broken (see 1 as an example, ironically), just open up Safari settings as instructed above, undo Focus, then reload the page. When you are done, just slide back on. This is unfortunate though.

1: https://blog.chromium.org/2017/01/open-sourcing-chrome-on-io...
MS has backwards compatibility for existing software, but it's a gamble to start a new project using MS tech, you don't know what they will cancel, rename or invent next year.

Apple doesn't have backwards compatibility for existing software and stuff breaks regularly from version to version. However, one can count on Objective-C to pretty much work (although Swift is still work in progress).

So both suck, basically.
Emacs just used a full blown programming language right from the start. And one of the very best: Lisp.
You hold a physical artifact on which some data can be extracted and interpreted by a device build for that purpose, but the legality of you playing the data isn't implicitly tied up to the ownership of the artifact holding the data. That is what the licensing scheme is. The common assumption is to think that because you hold the storage, you are therefore entitled to decode the data held on it, but the laws about IP are there to limit this and allow to extract value from you using the device.

Otherwise, you could just legally extract the bits downloaded onto your computer and keep the music files you have just streamed from Spotify or any equivalent service.
Traffic flow measured on 30 different 4-way junctions
It is far from fast and it is annoying to switch tabs. I used to use it initially, but I found the features a bit too restrictive so I uninstalled it.
Ask HN: Is the Bitcoin community doing anything about its environmental costs?
Elected officials with the support of experts, just like in every democracy
I like to be productive when writing code. That means a linter, and syntax highlighting, and maybe even Wallaby.js that runs tests immediately on file save and shows the results on the lines of the file.

Yes, there is a way to get all that using Vim. Install a bunch of plugins, like `alm` and syntax for stuff, and all of Tim Pope's amazing plugins, etc...

But then just moving the cursor in Vim becomes sluggish and slow. Sometimes hitting the `u` undo button might take 20 seconds or even a whole minute. That is not a fun experience.

The same thing with VS Code is immediate. In the rare occurrence that I want to jump to some weird place, I can move my hand to the mouse but in general, everything is accessible via keyboard shortcuts. The VIM-Mode of VS Code is almost perfect, the only gripe I have with it is that it cannot currently do proper block-mode copy-paste (but it does have block-mode! yey!)

So although I really want to love Vim and use it. The speed of VS Code is more important for me.

All those people who edit code without syntax highlighting, completion, typescript/flowtype popups, auto feedback from tests and lint, ... I just don't get how you can write code that way. It is silly to forego all this just because of a couple hundred megabytes of memory.
Yeah, me too. I also love watching people use emacs. There's always something neat that I haven't seen before. Unfortunately that is a very rare pleasure for me. I've only seen emacs in the wild a few times and mostly they were old professors using it with the standard configuration.
This is an interesting line of thought. Blind people are not disabled though, they can have careers. It’s a false assumption that blind = lifetime welfare. I’ve worked with awesome programmers who were completely blind from birth. And quite a few who were legally blind.

The comparison could be what the reduction in lifetime earnings due to being blind vs the $850k.

But I think that having a utilitarian view toward delivering healthcare is frequently unethical once you start rationing care (eg, I’m 75 and not working at all, living off social security, $300k heart surgery is detrimental to society’s bottom line since if I die I stop collecting social security, etc etc)
Klar also doesn’t send analytics to a third party like Focus does.