skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Finally, in response to questions we have received from other news organisations since Businessweek published its story, we are not under any kind of gag order or other confidentiality obligations.

That to me is the icing on the cake. Companies are usually not direct like that.

(Unless this is some kind of new NDA that allows/mandates itself to be denied)
There are some similarities. But the key difference are:

1) Solid is designed for you to store large, complete sets of data you care about over the protocol. OpenID is mainly about identity, and the associated bits of metadata are small and can't be written to by the OpenID protocol.

2) Solid separates the data storage from the application provider. So all your data could be in your Solid personal data store, and none in the application provider. (This was normal on Microsoft Windows in the 1990s, so think of it as a cloud version of that model of application development / data storage).

This is a high level quick answer - correct me if I've misrepresented something. Quickly looking there are lots of OpenID-related standards that I've never read or used, and I bet some write data!
> apple-only, apple-only, apple user lock-in, apple walled garden, apple.
> don't tell me I can do this with something else than apple.

Of you cannot play windows game on your linux box and you cannot get the same experience you have in the walled garden outside of it unless you change and adapt you devices.

I have a client with a Linux ecosystem and a single iphone, apple does not provide itunes for linux so making backup and generally dealing with the iphone required buying a second hand windows laptop specifically to deal with this because with each update of the iphone OS apple breaks previous compatibility with linux that had been added by enthusiasts.

I have a thinkpad running linux, it is cheaper, more powerful, thin (though this is not important), trivial to keep up-to-date, repairable, serviceable on site. I've set up a seamless sync for my computerphone which I use exclusively for phone calls, SMS and as a clock (no need for a gadget computerwatch that cannot even tell what time it is for 24h straight), lastly I do not use wireless headphones but I could if I wanted to.

I'm out of the apple prison-system for a damned good reason too, it's overhyped, very expensive, is often not compatible with hardware outside it (could it be a reason you're all in on the apple walled garden ?), does not allow me to do what I choose, engage in huge amount of tax evasion with significant social consequences, locks user in, relies on free software makes huge profit but doesn't donate back and it goes on and on.

What you describes here is nothing else than the existence of an impenetrable wall designed and built by apple to keep control and increase their profit, you choose to live inside the wall and I choose to live outside.

We, outsiders, like to think people choosing to live inside the wall do so because they are blinded not because they are evil as this is easier on us than riskig losing faith in humanity.
A synchronous language models everything as a mathematical function that is completely evaluated every « tick » of a clock (hence the term synchronous). It is very convenient for real time software: the resulting executable code is a single function that is evaluated repeatedly against its input every t seconds.

Disclaimer: looks easy, but if you take a few non trivial examples with concurrent state machines and contemplate the resulting C code, you will quickly understand why having a dedicated language is a good idea as opposed to trying to do it by hand.
http://outline.com/NpJ3Af
The burden of proof should be on the side pushing the accusations.

In that sense, Apple’s denial puts it squarely back to Bloomberg to prove it’s not bulshit. Until then it would be fair to discard their narrative.
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You're not suggesting the CIA is out of the drug business...are you?
Yep! I switched to Jira from an older in-house solution early this year, and have found it to be excellent so far. There's a little learning curve on the admin side, but the actual experience of using it for feature / issue tracking has been real positive.

A lotta folks I talk to have had bad experiences with Jira in a big-company setting -- say in particular, Amazon --- but most of those problems I've heard boil down to poor practices on the management / admin end, rather than problems with the software itself.

p.s. I've also used Asana and a few other less-costly solutions, but their limitations ended up getting frustrating.
This will be interesting to follow, it's very unlikely there is not some truth to this. The fact that Apple and others are pushing so strongly against the story (very defensive) which makes me believe they are hiding something for sure.
If you presuppose that the category is absurd, the submission of an absurd paper is a vacuous act that proves nothing, and your point should be able to be easily demonstrated by your knowledge of the field as it stands.
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I can't be the only one that thought many meetings could be improved by a random person joining a meeting and asking some obvious questions from outside the company bubble.
like shoplifting. Most large chains know exactly how much "loss" they experience, and they just raise their prices to cover it. Theft and fraud is a part of life unfortunately...
If I buy shares in a company say RDSB (Shell) I am allocating my capital to that company and someone else is selling theirs as they don't want to own that asset any more.

I did this when the share price was low so I was taking a long term view that it would recover and I would capture that value and also have the dividend at an expressed yield on between 6-7%.
I'd mention darktable[1] and bitwig[2], both are cross-platform linux/win/macos.

[1]: https://www.darktable.org/
[2]: https://www.bitwig.com/
As long as you are powerful, you can get away with almost anything. This goes from individuals to countries. Had China been weaker, it would have been invaded already .
I think it's just a matter of population. More people live around there, leading to more travel options nearby.
hmmm... definitely a trend of reporting on hacks. And perhaps with sensationalist clickbait headlines.

But they are confirmed hacks (Equifax, FB, Cambridge Analytica).
>good handshake - warm, dry, and politely firm

Anyone else suffer from seasonal (autumn, spring) palm sweat? This is like my single biggest issue during these periods.
Not the least because since Snowden we know the NSA does it.
> I don't have time to explain it to you

Just read that phrase again and think about how it comes across.
I work in finance and talked to somebody who implemented a Bloomberg terminal wall in VR. This would be a great application for VR since you never can have enough Bloomberg terminals open and usually never have enough screen space.

However he told me that VR can not be used for anything productive right now because of many problems. One thing is, only very few people can wear a VR headpiece for 8 to 10 hours straight without getting serious headaches and dizziness. The resolution has to at least be one order of magnitude higher for meaningful sized fonts being properly readable. The head pieces have to be one order of magnitude lighter. If you want to do more than a 2D wall displayed like a canvas in 3D you have to solve the problem that your eyes automatically try to focus differently on different depths which is also one major source of headache.

All in all I was convinced by him that the VR technology is at least 2 generations behind what you would need for serious work. Until then all kinds of software, SDKs and Hardware will change dramatically. Hence investing in VR productivity software development right now is a complete waste of time and money.
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The Norwegian national security agency has confirmed that they were aware of the allegations against SuperMicro since June, but they won't confirm if it's true (nor are they denying it) and they noted that they are also aware that Amazon/Apple are denying it.

As for why Apple/Amazon are denying it I wonder if it's because they don't want to burn bridges. If they confirm the allegations, how would that play out in the Chinese business world?
"Developers hate apple, facebook, and countless other platforms that are doing very well. "

No, most developers don't hate anything. Most developers are just normal people makin' stuff because their company pays them to.

Most developers are not particularly ideological.

Just some of us are ... perhaps a little bit more than in other industries.
US hiring growth shows signs of leveling off
Trading is when your speculating day or week to week.

Investing is saying "ok big warehouses for distribution companies like amazon is a growing market therefore I will buy shares in a company that owns warehouses (BBOX) - this is sort of how Warren Buffet works
I'm saying it doesn't matter either way.

To me it doesn't matter who built or lit the fuse. The piles of interconnecting ordinance were the derivatives. Any asset in a bubble that had decent exposure in a derivatives market could've triggered the disaster. The layers of deals too complex for anyone to understand that entwined many major financial firms are what made the Great Recession "Great".
Generally, for defamation to be actionable (that is, viable for a lawsuit) there needs to be either an intent to defame or a neglect of facts so severe that it is tantamount to intent.
"before servers are put into production at Apple they are inspected for security vulnerabilities"

A chip smaller than a grain of rice nested between motherboard layers.

What tools could detect such a chip?

While I don't doubt Apple inspects, the zero-day threat always exists.
The Trump admin says screw it, the world will burn by 2100 no matter what
The solution of course it to just allow people to do what they want.

Every now and then it’s useful to everyone to stop some things from happening - it’s easier to have the gate than to not.

The fact that that exemption exists is what drives the pain most people have with systems like this.

My trick was to say “while we’re building this let’s just leave it as open as possible, we can lock it down once we’re sure the process works how we need it” - and then never lock it down (or just lock down the bits that people use to shoot themselves in the foot).
Remember when Clapper gave the "least untruthful answer possible" about domestic bulk collection? [0]

It's naive to think Apple and Amazon couldn't lie in response to the article, if the intelligence was highly-classified. They may be under extremely strict gag orders (e.g. "give no response whatsoever, including silence, other than denial") and protected by promises of indemnity, as telcos were in the wake of the NSA disclosures.

Bloomberg is exquisitely specific and detailed about the chip, including photos and placement (on the baseboard management bridge, disguised as a shielding element.) There's two possibilities, then: someone cajoled dozens of officials across several companies to lie to Bloomberg, or the tech companies have been cajoled into lying.

Either way, the proof is in the pudding: every hardware pentesting shop will be going after these boards like they're looking for golden tickets. Either we'll get our die shot, or Bloomberg's getting their pants sued off.

0. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Jkb5FKlETqY
The man deserves credit of course for helping create the first browsers and promoting the early web and his work for W3C. However, Tim's track record is not great when it comes to backing new versions of the web. E.g. Semantic Web never happened and arguably this is his latest attempt at flogging that dead horse. So, my prediction is that this won't get very far. It seems the website is a bit hand-wavy on the actual substance or vision and from what I'm seeing there's not actually a lot there. This looks like a research prototype to me.

I like the idea of decentralized as much as the next geek. However, there's a tendency of complex decentralized stuff being something that normal people don't really grasp or see the value of. Also, a lot of this value is not very tangible or even real. Most p2p systems have a hard time competing against a well run centralized system.

A lot of these decentralized Facebook/Twitter alternatives are being populated by people that, well, aren't that social. If you are like that, the empty room problem (you have no friends until world + dog joins) is not a big problem. You might even consider that a feature and not a bug. However, solving the empty room problem really is the key problem for social networks. How do you get all the social media whores, self pro-claimed influencers, etc. from endorsing your super duper decentralized platform and wanting to be there? Mostly that never happens.
BLU Vivo XL4 Gets FCC Certification; Launching in US Soon
My highschool latin teacher - a highly idiosyncratic individual, not to put too fine a point on it - constructed not one, but two completely artificial languages, although to be fair, one was a derivative of the other, sort of the way many modern tongues are of latin.

The thing is, these were thorougly developed and well thought out constructs - the 'classical' one of them in particular being logically structured and built up from fundamental particles. Felt very much like real languages from what I saw of them. And as probably his only pupil ever to express an interest, believe me, I saw quite a lot. I can still picture him coming to a halt somewhere on the main street, scribbling in his ever present notebook if some new idea had presented itself. And I knew a fresh presentation would be coming up...

Idiosyncratic to begin with, and sliding into decidedly bunkers. He was pensioned off early from his teaching position, and later disappeared on a mountain trek. His languages went with him.
I found this very useful:

https://makeyourownneuralnetwork.blogspot.com/
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1530826608/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_U_x_x...

First part goes into what a NN is and how backprop works, second part is an implementation in Python.
Increasing the price, and eventually having google decline to pay for the default might also be a strategy they’re utilising.

2014: $1B
2017: $3B
2018: $9B
Especially the fact that it's working.
Well I didn't vote for you.
no subpixel antialiasing on Linux Firefox. Eeeeew, outline.com is disgusting for breaking a OS feature.
Regardless of whether this particular case is true or not, given the crucial role of computer systems in so many key institutions, it seems to me extremely risky to trust Chinese suppliers not to try to compromise critical infrastructure.

Then again, I understand that it could be argued that, if this is confirmed, to me it would seem quite rash from the Chinese, given that they would have known all along that such a scheme would be discovered sooner or later. It is one thing to plant a device as part of a spy operation, quite another to consistently compromise a whole supply chain.

Whichever is the case, the national interest and commercial interests seem to be seriously incompatible with one another when it comes to outsourcing such critical infrastructure to China, this seems obvious to me, regardless of the China policy of who is in government in US.
Ask HN: Is the “big hack” technically possible?
I guess we've all read the big hack story by now.

Like all sensational tech stories, I have my doubts on it.

I cannot verify any claim made by either party, but what I can do is evaluate the technical feasibility of the hack.

As I understand, it was a tiny chip used to control the BMC of supermicro servers.

By the look of it, it has 6 pins, which 2 must be used for power, that let us with four for whatever it was doing.

I do a bit of electronics, I went as far as designing my own low power arduino like board. But that's not enough to have a clear idea on how this chip could attack the board. The chip must be using SPI or something similar but where would it be hooked?

I know that this is mostly speculations, but I'm interested in all possible theories about how this chip works.
Actually, people do care about repairability more than you think, just look at the growing popularity of repair cafes.

To me the issue is that devices are made to appear obsolete, a marketing scheme to boost profit, in a limited time frame and replaced instead of repaired not because they are reliable (for example the lawsuit for prone to breaking keys on recent macbooka[1]).

People who care about upgradeability are people who know better and the vast majority does not and endure lack of performance from their badly chosen device for years due to not having enough money to replace them.

Just look at the sheer quantity of people using expensive smartphones despite broken glass, damaged screens and slowly failing touch because they cannot afford the cost of repair. This alone is tell sign that the cost of repair is a serious and significant issue.

[1]: http://www.businessinsider.fr/us/apple-macbook-butterfly-key...
I posted another comment but john Deere did this and had to remove sites in the US because of ecological harm onto farmers. We have a lot of them around my area too, my uncle installed most of them, the 1-2MW are really a dent when you see the size of US wind turbines
This is happening all ready for example one of my active investments saw the bank crash coming and mostly sold out of banks before the crash.

Then again this IT was started in 1888 and has increased its dividend every year for the last 51 years.
Has anyone seen a map like this for a fictional world? I'd love to see the Isochronics of Narnia.
The article suggested the chips were hidden under components. You would have to tear apart the motherboard and know what to expect exactly. The number of companies who do this kind of audit must be in the single digit if any.

Now the article may or may not be a hoax, but a few years ago the NSA was exposed doing exactly that. So at the very least it is credible.

As for detection, I’d rather expect this devices to be activated on demand, like creating a backdoor, rather than sending streams of data from all servers, most of which (per the article) will be owned by an adult website or a mormon church which aren’t exactly strategic activities.
I've never used Trac for tickets. My first introduction to Jira was replacing 5 different in-house ticketing systems covering systems, desktop support, to software development. Here are some of the things I've noticed that I haven't seen other ticketing systems do as well; each department's tickets had their own fields that were unique to them, you could pass a ticket department-to-department with a clear interface to map and update fields, a clear history was preserved when going from department to department, you could have a simplified interface for users (with additional, more intimidating fields for people working the tickets), you could update tickets by replying to emails (seems obvious/trivial, but that feature is often missing), search was very good. This was close to 10 years ago.

Fiddling with Trac tickets right now it seems like something I would love if I spent the time to learn. For example, search is just a text field. I imagine if I learned the syntax it'd be very powerful. I remember Jira, at the time, had a "simple search" with separate auto-completing fields for things like opened-by, assigned-to, open-date, and "complex search" that used a text-based syntax.

Not that Jira was amazing, but UI makes a big difference. A coworker showed me a different frontend someone had built in front of BugZilla and it looked 100x more approachable.

After working at places that didn't use Jira (well, almost all of them evaluated it but deemed it too expensive and too large of a project to migrate) my current job uses Jira, again. Man is it slow (I've heard this is growing pains of converting a codebase designed to run on a single server and making "services" out of it to scale) and there's way more confusing integration. I've been trying to use it as little as possible.
They tried that in 1929 with the Great Crash - it didn't work long-term.
How much did that cost you???
i2c/smbus is a standard 2-wire multi node bus that is used all over the place in motherboards.
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Doesn’t Apple provide loaner devices during repairs?
Samsung forecasts record $15.5B profit thanks to chips not smartphones
Unique hardware Id is incredibly useful to identify and track devices and people around.
We mitigate this risk by just having a spare device or spare laptop on premises. It works and it's cheap. We use tons of Macs in a business setting, and we're definitely not going back to PC's. The PC's were a nightmare (not in terms of the hardware, but because of the sofware) from a management and administration perspective. Primarily because of Windows. Using Macs running macOS has really been a gamechanger.
This article sounded a bit weird to me from the technical level, but I just assumed it could be lack of clear understanding on the nitty-gritty from the journalist, or just me not knowing about hardware enough to know what's possible and how.

Given this is all getting a little fishy I'll share what had me thinking:

1. The article mentions "they were capable of doing two very important things: telling the device to communicate with one of several anonymous computers elsewhere on the internet..."

Servers tend to run on VPNs. This being a dormant backdoor is believable, but then the article mentions:

> "American investigators eventually figured out who else had been hit. Since the implanted chips were designed to ping anonymous computers on the internet for further instructions, operatives could hack those computers to identify others who’d been affected."

Which makes me believe the devices were active and somehow circumvented corporate VPNs. I'm unsure how undetectable this could be using the system's network stack (or if it would be possible at all)-- would the claim then be that this tiny device shipped with a whole TCP/IP layer and some sort of very powerful wireless capability?

2. It continues with: "and preparing the device’s operating system to accept this new code"

Is this possible? Where would a device like this need to be wired to be able to write to memory with some arbitrary payload to do this? From the pictures it looks like it has 6 pins maximum-- could this do? If so, wouldn't this mean this device would need to do some next-level signal processing that would probably require advanced computation? Could said computation be done by a processing unit that fits the size of this chip?

Moreover, assuming it takes control of the OS independently would imply there's some decent amounts of memory in here, to hold the payload, etc. no? But if it's just a backdoor that doesn't take control of the OS, then how is it communicating over the internet with other machines like the article claims?

Again, I might be wrong and things that I don't think possible might. I'm mostly just curious to know if my intuition is too naive. Please comment below if you know more about these things than I do.

EDIT: I was really disappointed that the article itself didn't go into these technicalities, because IMO this would be an impressive feat and newsworthy by itself. The lack of alternative coverage in sources more close to technical expertise was weird to me.
Will add this feature in the TODO list :) thanks!
That was really good! Thanks for the link.
Perfect for places like Downtown San Francisco, or retirement communities.
Did you actually get a quote / estimate from Apple?
Your comment bot is acting up
i can only speak for melody, but with harmonic instruments it will be similar.

limit yourself to a few tones and improvise. that will get you to the core of that feeling quickly.

start with 3 notes of a cord, see what you can do with it, maybe try a 4th. than learn a scale you like and improvise within that.