skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If teens love Snapchat and are loyal to it beyond their teenager years (ie, what it would take for this to turn out well long-term), why aren't their user numbers growing? Each year, they should take in another cohort of new smartphone users and hold onto their cohort of existing former-teens.

(And, to clear myself of the charge that I am invested in other platforms: I have neither a financial investment in, nor am I a user of, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or any broadly similar product. I do use Whatsapp, very minimally.)
All major cloud providers are buying renewables for their operations. Yay?

At least the additional renewable generation capacity built out will exist for decades (while processors should become more efficient as these security issues are addressed and new hardware rolls out).
AMD is vulnerable to Spectre and are not fixing variant 2 because it’s “near zero risk”.

By near zero risk they mean that no one has yet reversed engineered their branch prediction which is required to effectively exploit it.

Give it sometime and the BTI patch would have to be enforced on AMD CPUs also.
Some of the Other Changes Slated for Linux 4.16 – Phoronix
> Then supporters will say you can't trust banks, fiat is going to zero, and spew conspiracy theories about the Federal Reserve.
Then someone will hype a random token, then a banker will call it all a fraud.

:D
Automatically classifying news articles with ML
Netflix and Amazon are founder members of the AOM that is developing and promoting AV1. If the smart dongle or TV supports AV1 they'll preferentially use that to get better quality at lower bandwidths.
Where Does Big Data Go from Here? – SD Times
Not tracking users when they ask not to be tracked?
Could someone clarify: What's the standard? Is it adopting EFF's DNT policy https://www.eff.org/dnt-policy? Is it hosting any privacy policy at /.well-known/dnt-policy.txt? Do any tools or browsers use that URL or display it to users? Has anyone else adopted this standard?
My reading is that levels were once randomly generated, but the updates ends this.

The update provides a fixed series of 10k hand-checked levels for everyone to play, regardless of their existing game state, so your game will end after hole 38,890.
The point of districting is to have the representation be more connected to a particular demographic than the whole state.

I get what you're saying about geography.

But the alternatives have a lot of pitfalls. An at-large candidate from Texas or California is not likely to be particularly close to any minority demographic that might desire a champion for their concerns. You end up with every candidate from Chicago, campaigning in Chicago and its collar counties, and no one ever visits or gets elected from Carbondale or Bloomington-Normal or the Illinois part of the Quad Cities.

It might be appropriate to segment the population by profession, such as to have all the bus drivers, car drivers, train operators, and pilots in the state nominally represented by the same person, while all the farmers, loggers, and ranchers have their own person. That faces the same problems as geographical gerrymandering, and more.

If you segmented the population alphabetically, the representative for surnames starting with the letters A through C does not have a particularly clear mandate. But at least it would likely be a fair distribution.

I think the simplest segmentation would be between urban and rural. Line up voters by the population density of their census tract. Slice the population into a reasonable number of buckets, 2 or 3, and the voters in those buckets elect a number of at-large representatives. You probably end up with liberal representatives for every urban core, moderate representatives for every suburb and commuter artery, and conservative representatives for every hamlet and unincorporated township that can still see the stars at night.
I think this issue can be described as a form of confused deputy problem.

Is not the real solution to have the confused deputies stop acting in a confused manner?

If this issue were confined to a handful of small hosting companies almost no one uses, then I don't think this would be described as a problem with Let's Encrypt - it would be described as a problem with those hosting companies.

The only party that can truly fix the issue of the incorrect user being granted access (directly or indirectly) to a domain pointed at shared infrastructure is the operator of that infrastructure.
Right, blame Facebook and Google's tracking on Microsoft's attempt to do what's better for their users privacy.
AWS IoT, Greengrass, and Machine Learning for Connected Vehicles at CES
Looks like some older iteration located here which does a better job presenting what they are trying to sell and how it's better

https://www.jumpdrive.io/index.html
Sure, it's a flag, but Nerv does have a test suite (with 96% coverage) that proves it runs across all browsers. I'm sure the marketing site does not have a test suite like that. You can't hold it to the same bar.
Without having studied the equations, but having seen similar phenomenon occur in other work my guess would be that the equation to determine the total area of the magnetosphere (let's say A = M(V,r) where A is the area and V is applied voltage and r is the distance from the sun) includes a component based on the density of the solar wind at that position.

The component is likely in the denominator because as solar wind density goes down we'd expect the magnetosphere size to increase.

Now, the solar pressure is something like P=S(r) where P is the pressure and r is the distance from the sun and S contains some geometry and solar power terms.

If we look at M(V) we could probably then find an M'(V) s.t. M(V,r) = M'(V) / S(r). To get the force produced by the drive we'd take M(V,r) * S(r) which cancels out all radius terms.

Mathematically this would indicate that the thrust on the magnetosphere would be invariant for all r within the solar system (after that point other terms within S() and M() that are based on solar output would likely start to break down)
IMO, tracking should be strictly opt-in, making it opt-out is abusive and ubethical.

I recently learned of GDPR. Although I'm uncertain of the exact law's implementation details, I think it's a step in the right direction. It's strictly opt-in and requires providing a clear explanation of what data gets collected.
That needs to be added to the title. I would've stopped my Amazon Smile donations to EFF if they were still wasting money pursuing this obviously pointless idea.
Isn’t 11.2.1 the battery patch?
> look at unstable governments in Europe based on oddball alliances

vs hammering through legislation with zero bipartisanship.

Which is actually a problem in parliamentary systems that end up with majorities.

These coalition governments are a feature, not a bug.
I have an example that illustrates this.

Just this morning I stopped at McDonald's for breakfast. I gave my order, they entered it, and it showed up correctly on the screen at the drive through. However, the order taker read back something completely different (than what they just entered). Since I saw that the order in the system was correct I ignored that and simply said "sure that's right."

This is why I prefer an interface that bypasses the human order taker. They may say one thing and do another. Even in my case, they may have then thought "well he confirmed what I just said back, and that doesn't match what the screen shows, so I'll fix it to match what the customer agreed to." Then I would have the wrong order. That can't happen if I interact directly with the order system.
Bluemix's OpenWhisk has been much better about keeping up with Node.js releases FWIW. (I used to work for IBM.)
So perhaps the real metric is "motivational momentum"?
This is really just the effect of the population (and by effect politicians) becoming more polarized. There has been a definite trend towards parties becoming more and more polarized ever since the end of WW II [1].

[1] https://legacy.voteview.com/political_polarization_2015.htm
It is cute to show it in a parking lot, but with those unprotected blades it is unlikely you will be able to operate it anywhere but on an airfield, helipad or private land, for safety reasons. And with four sets of contra-rotating blades (small, therefore turning fast) and a gasoline engine, it will be noisy as hell.
Why is it harmful? You state on your website that I’ll have my money within a certain period of time, yet that doesn’t happen. What if your bank did the same with your paycheck? It gets deposited on Friday and sometime in the future maybe you get it in your account. I’m sure there would be complaints.
Interesting, that article quotes the Exmoor NP authority "Swaling maintains the character of the landscape". I've asked perhaps 10 Brits, mostly walkers and climbers who value national parks, what they think about reforesting. I'd estimate the response as 50/50 in favour, with those not in favour often using very similar phrases to "character of the landscape."
So far the evidence you've presented is that Apple makes money, and that they abandoned a technology they no longer felt merited inclusion in a product.

That is not evidence of malevolence on Apple's part, nor specifically that the inclusion of anti-tracking technology has malicious business-case intent.
We fly the CRJ Series and ERJ Series. These are 50 to 100 seat passenger aircraft. Same planes that United Express, Delta Connection, and American Airlines use. We'll make that more clear on the website.
As it concerns my role, accessibility is the main benefit. They do not have identical behaviour.

A <p> tag will be read out by a screen reader as "paragraph", but a div tag will not read out anything but the text inside. I only use a <p> tag if I want my accessible users to know that this is a paragraph (of a larger body of text).

I suppose you could make similar arguments for the other semantic tags. You use them when the content explicitly matches the intent of the tag so that other software can pick up and read it with a bit of... ahem understanding.
Something isn't right with his benchmarks.

My iPhone 6 benchmarks:

Geekbench test taken on Dec 18, 2017 with iOS 11.2

Single Core: 1566

Multi-Core: 2697

Geekbench test taken on Jan 10, 2018 with iOS 11.2.2

Single Core: 1551

Multi-Core: 2675

Percentage slowdown:

Single Core: 0.96%

Multi-Core: 0.82%
That’s interesting. I mean it drives me nuts sometimes but it’s also the natural progression of spoken language right?
Is anyone using Angular 2+ in prod? How is it working out and how complicated is it to upgrade 2 -> 3 -> 4...?
A look at the handling of Meltdown and Spectre
Can we ban them from doctor's offices and the airports too? Let's go back to reading magazines and books.

I felt like more brain cells died having Fox News shouting at me for two hours at a time while waiting at various doctor's appointments with my mom back in the South than any drinking I've done.
I agree with you, the lack of QA skills in a team is a dangerous thing. But I disagree with the notion that the agile methodologies are the problem, more like an excuse from the same people that would use any other excuse to cut corners[0]. A QA column (or set of columns) fits perfectly with Kanban.

Years ago I started seeing companies combining QA and product teams[1]. It required product people with a bit of technical background but, when done right, worked incredibly well. Nowadays not only I've stopped seeing that trend, but most product teams I see are completely ignorant of technical matters. QA teams seem to be more or less missing or seriously understaffed.

---

[0] Not to speak of the need to be "agile" without changing a single thing in the process. I can't count the number of times I've seen teams using what is, essentially, a waterfall process (including long development cycles with no contact with the customer at all) self-describing themselves as agile.

[1] So the same team defining the new features also creates the tests, both automated and manual, and checked the results.
We'll make that more clear on the site. Thanks for the feedback
with inputs from the motion sensors even more so.
Instagram has caught way up to Snapchat with kids IMO. Millennials aren't looking down on Instagram the same way they look down on Facebook, although I do see the potential as long as Instagram keeps messing around with the timelines and practicing the crude art of withholding likes and comments from users in order to get them to check back more often.

One thing I really, really like about what Snapchat is trying to do is go against what makes them money in order to make their user base happier. Separating Friends and Discover is bad for cash but good for customer experience. If they can keep my friends' snaps and advertisers' snaps entirely separated I would happily start snapping more.

As it is, I can't watch my friends' stories on either app without being forced through ads and I find it incredibly annoying.

The answer to this article's headline is, hopefully, "a fun place where I can share photos with my friends and not see an ad."
Does GeekBench 4 make a lot of syscalls? My understanding is that these are the most affected by the mitigations.
An the apple police bring down another anti-applr website.
Also, the slow down is related more to the battery = slow down than the new meltdown scare. Amazing, they reduced 50% of the CPU power so you don't have "battery" issues haha
You are correct, it appears to be that "patch".

Source: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8211392
We haven't started flying yet. We plan on having our first flight within the next few months. We'll add some photos of the aircraft we use to the site. Thanks for the feedback.
I don't really understand how this is supposed to help. If I'm an advertiser/tracker/etc, what keeps me from adding the policy file to my website - so adblock, duckduckgo etc. are happy - and then blatantly violating it?

The "policy" doesn't seem to be legally binding in any way, there is no way to even detect violations and the EFF itself writes that it can't enforce it:

> Posting the dnt-policy.txt file makes a promise to the users who interact with their domain. We believe it would be a false and misleading trade practice to post the policy without the intent to comply in good faith. However, EFF is not in a position to enforce this promise or monitor compliance. [1]

So what's the point?

[1] https://www.eff.org/dnt-policy#faq-What-does-the-dnt-policy....?
Ah just like the good old days on the BA LHR to EDI route run up to the counter whack the card down and wait less than 30 mins for the next flight.

Just time for a cheeky pint as the lounge next to the boarding way had a bar.- the afternoon cream teas where nice as well.
That might stop being true if the air is as crowded as the roads.
Ok, I'm sceptical about the results. The reason is that there doesn't seem to be a massive difference between the tests. Since this fix is about speculative exec, why would it affect crypto code which is very register based and branchless as much as sqlite which is full of branches and memory/storage based? Why would it affect AES which is hardware accelerated as much as integer processing which is not?

I'm not saying this is impossible - maybe there's something that I'm missing. But it just doesn't add up at the moment. I'd love a more detailed / repeatable test.
I don't believe this is fair - user consent is clearly marked by the standard as an alleviating requirement.

Without any user input, one must believe consent is imputed upon all users absent a statement to the contrary to justify a 'please track me' default.

It was the refusal of ad networks to justify why people should consent to their surveillance which torpedoed the initiative. They could have. They didn't. If they believed users wouldn't like their argument, all they had to do was sweeten the pot until people jumped on board.

It remains to be seen whether or not avoiding the discussion was ultimately in their best interest - the political power-play has already started to bear poisonous fruit for the industry.
Exactly. I think as a society we are at a stage where we are trying to guarantee justice without the need for discretion and wisdom. And it's simply not going to work. I mean, maybe when we have nanotechnology embedded in our brains recording our every action. May as well through free will out the window while we're at it -- no autonomy = no crime.
FACEBOOK SUCKS - I ONLY USE IT TO STALK MY EX-GIRLFRIENDS.
So in cases like the Louis CK and Harvey Weinstein scenarios, the women would take out their smartphone and inform the other party to look at the app?
Depends on the discipline. I haven't really heard of frequent non-reproducible results in physics, chemistry, and geology. It seems to be more of a medicine-biology-psychology problem.

Personally I think psychology shouldn't even be a separate field from neuroscience. Psychology is, after all, merely an emergent phenomenon from neuroscience, but culture can muddy whether psychological results are truly indicative of how humans think or rather of how a culture has conditioned us to behave in a certain way. I can't remember his name (and I hope someone does and links his wikipedia article), but there was a very well-known and controversial figure within the psychology/psychiatry community who believed that psychology was only slightly better than pseudo-science, and that oftentimes it merely studies behavior and pathologizes others based on our culture rather than science. I just think we don't know enough about neuroscience to really make psychology a very legitimate field of study - it's like trying to perform chemistry without the knowledge of electrons.
Phlogiston was actually disproved by applying the lower level principle of weight to the supposed phlogiston reaction.

The idea was that phlogiston was released when things burned. This was disproved when it was observed that some things gained weight when burned. Either the concept of weight was wrong, or the concept of phlogiston was wrong.

The scientific method requires you to reduce your reasoning into the lowest-level possible discrete arguments. In this case, scientists were forced to abandon phlogiston as it worked on a very high level, but did not integrate with lower level observations.

My gripe boils down to a desire of psychologists to provide sweeping high-level conclusions without even being able to describe possible lower-level phenomena.
iTunes used to have this. You could vote from your phone for a song playing on a PC. It was pretty neat when DJing for kids parties.
Leave aside the argument that people outside of agricultural states will not understand that the billions of dollars worth of agriculture are valuable, which seems false.

Even so, California is our largest agricultural producer, and it's disenfranchised by the Senate. Other major producers include some small states like Nebraska, but also other large states like Texas, Illinois and North Carolina.
I think this is true. I would have to pay my taxes in Germany and make a "Zweigniederlassung".
It's OK to be skeptical. But when evidence is presented that it's not the case, and you are doubling down by denying it, it's not being skeptical anymore. It's refusing to accept the facts since they don't fit your preconceptions.

> We mainly don't know what happened at Google.

We don't, beyond public evidence (including one in the lawsuit and outside). But that evidence we do have, and it does not align with your presumption that Damore was poor performer, unless you accept a completely invented premise that all his peers in Google somehow colluded to fake his reviews and performance evaluations, but he was still unhappy and decided to push the diversity angle to achieve... I don't know what, getting fired from a job where everybody, according to you, were going out of the way to make him happy? I don't think this is a workable hypothesis, and certainly not one that bears minimal skeptical scrutiny.

You can't be called "skeptical" if you only mistrust evidence which does not fit your preconception, but accept and even invent one that fits one. That's not skepticism, that's agenda.
That will likely only ever come when we build a better programmer with superhuman ability to track system state. But not just kernel programmers: every programmer.

I heard once in a Windows Update talk (probably a BUILD talk I watched on Channel 9?) that the Windows kernel needs far fewer restarts than people assume; Microsoft just doesn't trust most application software in user space to continue to work if they silently swapped kernel components out from under it. Too much software does dumb things with system state or makes wrong assumptions about system calls (despite stacks of manuals telling them otherwise).

The UWP application lifecycle model is built to support the kernel asking an app to pause, save what state it can, and restart at some point later with just a hint of its previous state. So many programmers seem to hate it (and get it wrong) because it means they have to think about state management more than they ever had to before.

That API was informed by the need to restart individual applications without rebooting the entire system. If more apps followed the UWP application lifecycle well, Windows would need fewer reboots.

(Compare to the Xbox One where developers were not given a choice to opt-out of the UWP application lifecycle, and it having mostly just two forced restarts a year. Also note how many game developers and app developers get the UWP application lifecycle wrong and you find games/apps in broken states when you get back to them, requiring a force quit.)

The easiest thing to change is your habits as a user and make sure that reboots aren't a problem to you. Windows 10 gives a lot of warning (more so now than at launch, of course) when reboots are coming up, including not-subtle things like system notifications, and subtle places like wording changes in the Shutdown menus as updates approach (first "Restart" becomes "Update and Restart", then as the deadline looms closer, "Shutdown" becomes "Update and Shutdown"). Find software that saves more state between restarts; encourage applications to move to the UWP application lifecycle (and use it correctly); checkpoint your work more often; speed up your startup and eliminate everything you can from the critical path (sorry, Slack, you can wait a few minutes after I've finished booting; I don't need my Windows Service that performs backups to run Automatic, it's fine to be Automatic (Delayed) delay started by Windows). Those are all things you can do proactively instead of being angry at Windows needing to restart because it is overly-worried your applications will break in mysterious ways if it doesn't.
I helped to found kitTea (kitteasf.com) here in SF. So... obvs I love the idea. If anyone has any questions about cat cafes etc... AMA

One thing I will say from an entrepreneurial standpoint, is that is was soon OBVIOUS that people loved the the idea and there was (some) demand.

I generally doubt that products market themselves & am skeptical of organic growth stories. But this was a case that showed me there can be big positive demand signals.
485 climate papers in 2017 not supporting the consensus position
I think the real metric is "it's complicated" and that we shouldn't be hasty to draw over-generalized, innaccurate analogies.
6 and 6S have different CPUs.
From the FAQ:

Can I still change my mind?

Absolutely. "No" means "no" at any time. Being passed out means "no" at any time. This is explicitly described in the agreement. Additionally you can withdraw consent through the LegalFling app with a single click.

So, Yes means Yes except when it means No, which is a state that by definition cannot be reliably updated into the "smart contract" (because the party involved is unconscious).

"Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig; es ist nicht einmal falsch!"

Congratulations, you've created a system with the surface appearance of trust but is in fact entirely undefined, and used it to reflect state of a highly fraught and complicated social situation.