skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wait, was this really written in 93?

There's no way, right? Was JS even this functional back in 93?

Hmm, I wonder what the cite at the bottom means then:

Object Oriented Graphs

Stephen North, 3/19/93

Searching Stephen North brings up a very interesting Google Scholar page full of citations about graphs and dot: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=_QJP9-0AAAAJ&hl=en

Neato. (Ha. Cue yakety-yak music.)

Holy moly! Attention HN, we have a delightful mystery on our hands! Sound the alarm: http://www.webgraphviz.com/viz.js

So who cares? Well, it's clojure-compiled for one, so all the variables are all Yu Ugy Jagugnug (i.e. Worf would understand).

For two, the js-beautified version is 56,586 lines! What could this be?

It's all hardcore math/algorithm type code. No comments, no indication of how to pick up the scent. Hmmm.

Welp, there goes my afteroon. See you on the flipside. tugs feverishly at massive ball of string^Wyarn^WJS

Here's a beautified gist, if you want to dig. https://gist.github.com/anonymous/52cd90a1fa9c36b1b3e87a431d...

(Seriously though, WTF is going on in that file? The last time I saw 55k lines of condensed algorithms, it was when I concatenated together all of emacs' source code from one of its earliest commits.)

Oh.. Is this just emscripten? It looks like compiler output. Yeah, "g | 0" is an asm.js trick.

Man.. This is a really effective way to obfuscate code, holy moly. So I'm guessing that's just graphviz's C code?

EDIT: Yup. At the very bottom, there's a single string, literally the only string in the entire file that gives any clue what the heck is going on: "vizRenderFromString".

And indeed, it leads us to https://github.com/mdaines/viz.js/blob/a8f5fd9ec41482e31bb0b... and more generally to the viz.js codebase: https://github.com/mdaines/viz.js

Oh, duh. Graphviz was written back in '93, and that sample code contains a citation back to its author.

What a cool program! And a cool sequence of layers... I love the onion-y nature of modern computing.
Maybe the difference is that Apple has, recently, been announcing products well in advance of their official release date. We knew about the HomePod and the iMac Pro months before they failed to be released on the date promised. Maybe nothing has changed about their ability to deliver products, we just know more about their failures.

Horrible article.
I guess I should also learn to code as a woman.
Anyone know what was the reason her hands died? Inadequate oxygen supply? Couldn't they have just oxygenated her blood in the hands?
AMD PSP is basically their equivalent to Intel's ME, so this is not surprising... but then it says

This function is called from TPM2_CreatePrimary with user controlled data - a DER encoded [6] endorsement key (EK) certificate stored in the NV storage.

If I understand correctly, this is related to SecureBoot and to do such operations with the keys and certificates, the user has to have physical access to the BIOS/UEFI setup already, correct?
I think that 'About the security content of macOS $SOMEVERSION' is far less useful as a headline.
Integrating AWS CloudFormation with AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store
> It's state government trying to override local economic (zoning) decisions. It's the very definition of a centrally planned economy.

You are mischaracterizing the law and what zoning is. Zoning does not produce any housing and is instead an artificial constraint on housing supply. The planning after this law is still done at the city level, but the city is constrained in what planning it can do.

> There's one Caltrain stop. It's a 30-minute walk from the residential part of Brisbane, across the freeway and around the dump. MUNI bus service to the area is irregular and unreliable. The only practical commute option is car.

The developer is proposing to build upon the landfill just next to the caltrain stop, so for the new development this won't be a concern.
There we go, that's a constructive comment. Here's a COOKIE.
Do they have an overage charge for the free 100/month, like the 1.25/1000 they list for their non-free use? So you could be free most of the time with the occasional 1.25 charge if you have a busy month?
> the last one

I've lost track now.. which one do you mean?

The OPM breach of the SF-86 database is still the worst and most catastrophic that I'm aware of. That was larger (millions), was the result of background checks (aka blackmail fodder), included full read/write access (tainted?), and likely every position that required a clearance outside the CIA.
RT has some questionable ratings.

On some new movies the rating is very high, but it goes down sharply.

IIRC one of the Fast and the Furious "movies" had a stupidly high rating, which is now more sane.

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/franchise/the_fast_and_the_fu...

IMDB seems to suffer from this less.

The only useful thing on RT is their one line blurb.
Is it valid for a game author to claim a copyright on something like the game's music in a playthrough though? Or is that fair use?
The author brings up a good point wrt GDP not accounting for debt. If the US were to borrow $1tn from China and splurged it all on military spending, we'd see a massive increase in GDP next year, but we would only be impoverishing ourselves in the long run.

Adjusting the GDP figures to account for foreign-debt, and investments held by foreigners, seems like something that can be computed objectively, and would still serve as a superior metric.
I still see the Google Project Zero mitigations in this list. What did they walk back?
This is like saying "given enough time, energy, and computing power, you could just factor large semiprimes by exhaustive search." It's both true and uninteresting because nobody has or ever will have that much time, energy, and computing power.
This is the part I don't understand. How is the processor able to read a cacheline from a protected memory page without crashing (even if it was speculative and wouldn't happen in the idealized execution due to branching).
In a case of art imitating life I'm reminded of this episode of the old late night Canadian comedy show Second City TV titled CCCP1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHjaAu1GTZU&feature=youtu.be
I've been using https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv which is quite nice and has a few other very handy csv tools.
The problem is that Apple doesn't want to have a "B team" on anything, they'd rather have an A team or no team. This is just a personal observation, and I don't really agree with it as it means I sometimes have to go outside the Apple ecosystem for specialty things I need.
Announcing uModbus 1.0.0 – A pure Python implementation of the Modbus protocol
Which essentially means you node is now a web server with all the responsibilities that entails (keep backups, always connected, etc). It feels fragile - I can't imagine pinning everything I ever read (or think might possibly be important some day).

What about all the .EXEs (games, etc) and SDKs I download? I'll bet over the past 10 years I've downloaded and viewed a few hundred GBs (or more) of content.

If I ever want to see anything again, I have to pin (cache it locally). I could do _that_ (cache locally) with today's web.

I like the idea. But just don't see it working well at scale.
> Simpler explanation is that academics fear each other more than they fear closed access. So they won't publish in an open journal for fear their colleagues will get ahead by publishing in a prestigious closed journal.

That first sentence seems a bit like saying that people suffering from starvation fear their fellow men, simply because they are competing for a scarce resource.

What I, as an academic, fear, or at least have to respond to, is an incentive system that judges the quality of my publications on the established reputations of the journals in which they appear. It's true that my fellow academics are rivals for promotions and positions, and in this respect I suppose that I fear them in some way; but they suffer as much from the system as I do, and some of the most established use their prestige to fight the good fight (Timothy Gowers being one of the big names on that list), and so I think that the antagonistic sound of saying that I fear them is not accurate in its implication even if it is so in some technical sense.
Well, as far as I know the state-of-the-art results on current drug toxicity prediction benchmarks (e.g., Tox21) are held by deep neural networks; it seems like recent AI advances HAVE proven useful in that regard.
AMD ships microcode update to disable some branch prediction
The OIG case data would have nothing to do with SF-86 data which is kept by OPM.

The OIG investigates complaints against DHS (and child agencies) officials, employees, and policies brought by Congress, the public, and other agencies. It's similar to the stereotypical Internal Affairs department in every police movie.
> the fact that Whedon wrote the screenplay for "Alien: Resurrection" tells me that Whedon is not world-class

I think that's a bit unfair. Joss wrote the original screenplay, but it was butchered en route to the screen. He's still pretty narked about having a story credit: "There is always going to be a shitty Alien movie out there. A shitty Alien movie with my name on it."

I liked the original Avengers, and I think it did a great job handling a sprawling and convoluted brief (there's a 17-part breakdown out there if you're really keen [1]), but TV was his natural medium. Firefly, obviously, but there are moments in Buffy that I'd honestly defend as the best TV ever made.

Not going to argue about JJ Abrams, though. Possibly the most overrated director ever, with a perfect reverse-Midas track record when it comes to franchises.

[1] http://www.toddalcott.com/the-avengers-part-1.html
It's sort of victim blaming. The code is wrong for having instructions corresponding to a[*b] anywhere in it, rather than our processor is wrong by speculatively executing them with visible effects.
Another way to think of it is that China would be giving us $1trn worth of stuff for only the cost of servicing that $1trn of debt (remember to subtract inflation). Does that make us or them poorer? Think carefully.
You are talking about the phase where stuff was not publicly known. I talked about the point of it becoming publicly known.

The way that it actually happened, rather than being the way that Intel expected it to happen with this paper all nicely ready on the first day (like Google's happened to be ahead of time), was pretty clearly unfortunately very much down to the premature disclosure. Witness what Paul Turner said (hyperlinked from one of the aforegiven discussions) about Google's and Intel's original goals for the week, for example.

One can speculate about an alternative universe where Linus Torvalds had this to read before the press releases. There's a whole chapter that addresses the points that he raised.

* https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/1/3/797 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16066968)

It is interesting that you bring up M. Ionescu. I'll see M. Cantrill's surprise at no-one commenting on Intel's paper, albeit that this is becoming less and less true by the minute by dint of posts like yours and mine, and I'll raise him no-one on Hacker News commenting at all on Microsoft; even though it was a more prominent topic of discussion in my workplace today (when the office systems administrator found out that updates were not happening) than any Linux machine or BSD. (-:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076660
I hadn't seen that tool, thanks for pointing it out.
> can anyone tell me why the accessibility check for protected memory doesn't happen before the cache loads the contents of RAM?

From what I understand, it does happen on AMD, which is why AMD CPUs are not vulnerable to the more dangerous Meltdown attack (any code reading kernel / hypervisor host memory).

Intel / ARM delays the checks until later, to the time when the speculated instructions are actually finalised and make their results available. This is faster, and loading some memory into the cache is normally invisible to the unprivileged code. The checks would still be done when actually reading that memory. But nobody spent enough time considering the timing side-effects of the cache.

Now even if the protected memory reads are fixed by the OS updates - then it still leaves the Spectre attack - code running in a process reading all of "its own" memory, regardless of any software sandboxing. This means that all sorts of sandboxing methods for javascript interpreters, bytecode interpreters, plugin architectures, etc are insecure. And the OS patches can't help here, because the sandbox isn't in protected memory.
Yes she is, she goes into much detail about how she started writing code but isn’t a coder at heart.
Yes, content on IPFS is represented as a Merkle tree so if you pin the top of the tree it will traverse down and recursively pin all of the subtrees as well. (You can, of course, pin a subtree explicitly if there's a only certain part you want.)
Indeed, perhaps it will give you some fun ideas!
That's why there were so many rebuttals to their arguments.
I imagine they mean the decryption key (rather, the ‘private, encryption’ key).
Ah yes, I forgot. Deepmind just secretly computed all 10^100 board states for alphago...

Neural nets have been very successful for a lot of things while also being overhyped, but dismissing it all as marketing hype is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
TPM's are supposed to be resistant to physical attacks.

With this flaw, someone can just stick a bootable USB stick in your computer to mirror the LUKS/bitlocker disk drive and get access to the keys in the TPM which protect that drive.
I honestly think this really hurts them - I used to be able to tell people "Just buy an Apple, it won't be cheap but it will be a fair value."

Now I have to people them what Apple models to avoid like the plague.
Well that value has to still be read into the cache, since the "kern_mem[address]&0x100" calculation is speculatively carried out. I don't think the MMU can do any bit level computations.
It is very useful in corporate networks where you are not allowed to install anything locally.
In a pipelined CPU, you want to start the memory fetches for which instructions to next feed into the instruction decoder, before the branch instruction has finished the execute stage. Otherwise every branch incurs a pipeline bubble.
The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century
Thanks, yes agreed, this sounds like a willfully misplaced label.
Unpleasant as this is, it's worth pointing out that the superlawyer who bought the hands for her, Mark Holden, is almost certainly the same Mark Holden who sits on the board of directors for Americans For Prosperity and runs the public sector legal division for Koch Industries.

It's generous indeed for him to spend $200,000 on prosthetics for a stranger, but this story would be more heartwarming if he wasn't at the same time working to strip millions of people of their health insurance, which is what AFP is zealously trying to do.
User Interfaces: How Not to Design a Microwave
I'm surprised by this, since I was coming in here to say "AI in bio research is mostly a dead-end, except perhaps for NLP paper-mining stuff." I can see how medical applications would be tricky (since the field is covered in regulation from the 19th century and doctors have a deep-seated fear of computers) but as a (roughly speaking) biologist I would love to have a program that would let me ask high-level conceptual questions and get answers from the general mass of academic literature. Or, given some experimental result, find equivalent past experiments that corroborate/negate the result. Etc. Things that seem plausible with modern NLP and a fairly conservatively-written corpus, but I haven't heard of tools that could do this. (Even Siri style "here's what I found for your question, now look through these and see if they make sense" would be abundantly useful, if it's sifting out the right ~10 papers most of the time.)

Every scientist I know has a desk covered in papers (presumably, the select few that were important enough to print out) and even for experts it takes time to glean information from densely-written things like that; there's definitely a problem there to be solved.
I think Intel's ME is much more complex than AMD's PSP. Does anyone know if AMD's PSP has a full network stack and the ability to interact with network hardware independent of the main CPU's OS?
The thing is that what you say holds true for any white collar job. You are enriching the founders, investors and executives while you get paid a middle/upper middle class salary. What’s different about tech is that if you love it you can get paid to better yourself in your area of passion. You still have to be cognizant of corporate dynamics and your own mental health though.
I'm not so sure.

I've been taking an express bus into the city center from a rural location for a few years now. The time on the bus is between 35-50 minutes each way. Initially, I figured the same thing: I could get an extra hour of work done, work on side projects, etc.

The reality is that although the buses have WiFi, there are not many people working on them beyond the occasional email check. One major issue I found is that it's a lot harder to use a keyboard on something that's travelling on a road surface vs. a railroad. I even joked with someone about this last month as he was sitting next to me trying to write Javascript.

Most people on the bus are either playing video games or listening to music and I suspect that being that the people in this area are older and have families to get home to, having a more pleasant commute isn't remotely as important as having a shorter one would be.
YES. Exactly this.

It's fine to make approximations to avoid exponential scaling, but applying function approximators essentially randomly won't get you anywhere. This is then compounded by the fact that the functional framework you're starting from is not a first-principles approach.

Until there is QMC for drug discovery, it will all be hype.
so about 2^75? That means I only need to identify 75 independent things on earth that have a 50-50 chance of ocuring on another planet. I need to identify less things as long as I find something with long odds.

- Dense enough to hold an atmosphere
- far away enough from the star
- close enough
- right star
... ect

Carbon life is probably the only life possible, maybe silicon. Carbon just has way to many things going for it (especially the bootstrapping process - try randomly creating something that behaves like a transistor vs. an amino acid).

But what I think is the crux of the matter is that it's all irrelevant: what the numbers suggest is that life elsewhere is probably irrelevant to the human experience < we're necessarily too far apart for our light cones to intersect.
Selection bias, because of the cultural, educational, and or financial resources required to come to the US, they are far more likely to come from the mid to upper echelons of the social structure in India. They are also more likely to be upper socioeconomic class in the US, so less incentive to act on caste identity.

Most of the violent aspects of caste discrimination occur at lower socioeconomic levels, where the intensity of the tribalism is exacerbated by poverty.

However, many middle class Indians in the US still follow traditional caste rules in aspects of their personal lives, particularly in marriage, and sometimes in other social associations.

There is also some selection bias among many Indian immigrants towards egalitarianism, leaving behind stifling aspects of the old culture.

The horrible acts of discrimination described in the article are a product of both the Indian social structure and the local communal conflicts.
From your link:

E(R_m)-R_f is sometimes known as the market premium (the difference between the expected market rate of return and the risk-free rate of return).
Don't forget those <blink> tags.
Preface: I work for Mycroft, mentioned earlier in the thread. We're the open source alternative to the Amazon Alexa and Google home. This makes us customizable, privacy-minded, and neutral.

The thing with the current voice assistants is that they store every. single. piece. of voice snippets they hear. Those recordings sit on their servers. At the end of the day, these corporations have a purpose other than creating a voice technology--they have very specific ways to pay the bills. Amazon is an e-commerce platform. Google lives off AdWords. To think they won't utilize the data they're collecting.. doesn't sound like a strategic decision they'd make.

For those looking for a voice assistant that represents them--and not the corporation behind it, is Mycroft. A way to democratize voice and AI.

Nonetheless, we're in the process of making our second device and if you're interested, you can get updates on it in the link below! We'd love for you to join our community and help us create an open voice assistant. Head to https://mycroft.ai :)

https://mycroft.ai/kickstarter-mark-2/?utm_source=ActiveCamp...
I am sure Linus knew about this before, just like I was disclosed most of the things in the paper (in .pptx format).

Based on how the early disclosure was handled, I would have expected the same mess even without the emergency premature lifting of the embargo. Maybe a little less scrambling, but the same confusion, plenty of discussions on 0-day and no fixes for noncommercial distros. Everything else is wishful thinking.
99.999 percent of all species remain undiscovered
how that ever got approved if the security model was clearly leaking at that point

Keep in mind that for a very long time, PCs and x86 CPUs were used in environments where either there was a single user with full access, or multiple users that aren't completely adversarial (look at Win95/98's multiuser security model, for example.) Memory protection and other security features served as a barrier to accidents and to "keep the honest honest", not determined adversaries.

They still are today, but this is very different from the shared servers/cloud computing environments which have now become common --- completely mutually untrusting users with possibly adversarial relationships are sharing the same hardware.

This is the reason why all the CPU manufacturers have had some variant of "as designed" in their public comments --- speculative execution was designed with the former model in mind, not the latter.
Google’s Latest Search: What Happened to Its Bikes?
Want a diet plan? All this startup needs is your money, blood and DNA
I wish there was an easy way to just point it at a folder, but at the moment it seems that you have to manually handle adding the content. If anyone knows of such a solution I'd love to hear about it.

The IPFS daemon handles NAT in much the same way that BitTorrent does: NATed peers will dial out to un-NATed ones to establish a connection. I'm not sure if it also handles UPnP and the like to automatically forward ports if possible.
These issues are new to us (not just on Apple). But I wonder how long they have been know to the NSA.
$10 quantum dots change the color of light and lower the cost of electricity 34%
Why can't we all just get along?

If we disagree, let's agree to disagree without violence?

How can our increasingly global society grow robust to provocations?