skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed, I've been feeling indifferent about all these timing sidechannels ever since the very first ones (Spectre/Meltdown). The PoCs have not been particularly convincing to me, given that they are extremely contrived and rely on knowing the exact details of the system being exploited to such an extent that someone with those details would be better off with other ways in, and assumes those details haven't changed at all during the amount of time required to do the attack --- the nature of these side-channels is such that even the smallest change in environment can completely change the results.

In other words, if I choose a process on my system at random, and dump a few dozen bytes from it, I can technically claim to have leaked some data; but the use of that data to an attacker likely depends strongly on factors which are outside of the attacker's control. It's somewhat like finding a (real-world) key on the ground: you theoretically now have access to something you shouldn't have, but you have next to no idea what that something is.

But I feel confident that these issues are purely academic and, while interesting, serve more to provide content for PhD theses than represent urgent hazards on the web.

They also provide content for sensationalist clickbait articles and fuel the paranoia that drives society towards authoritarianism and furthers the war on general-purpose-computing, which IMHO is a much bigger issue to worry about.
fun idea. Does asml have any customers in Europe?
Poster of yesterday's top item here - thanks for the email! It was completely unexpected (to the point where I needed to convince myself it wasn't a weird spear-phishing attempt) and I appreciated the opportunity to share the story again with the community. In my opinion it's a fantastic example of user-centered design, with a great story.
What's Happening with Epic and Apple
What looks to me is that the people who were made uncomfortable were mostly the owners. So they would like to make it clear that no employees may ever make them uncomfortable again. Stratification in the organization indeed.
I didn't post about backups to imply that they're the solution to ransomware. But having seen what ransomware can do, I know that backups can be the difference between loss of productivity, and the end of the business.

If you are keeping to best practice, including the things you recommend, then you should hopefully never need backups. But I see backups akin to seat belts, motorcycle helmets, fire extinguishers, et. al. They are things you should hopefully never need if you aren't doing anything stupid or dangerous, but if the situation ever goes sideways, can be the difference between surviving or not.
I'd say the person trying to dictate the speech of other people, especially when that speech conforms to physical reality more than the alternative.

And especially when people seek power over others by trying to control speech.

I don't believe that there's anything wrong with ASKING to be referred to in a specific way. Or in voluntarily complying. I would try to comply, out of courtesy.

But it's certainly political to try and FORCE compliance. People may have many reasons for not complying and they don't have to justify their beliefs to all comers.

If you want to use female pronouns to refer to me, go for it. It's not a violation of my rights in any way. I don't need everybody to agree with how I see myself. I'm pretty sure most don't.

At the same time, I realize how much of a pain it is to constantly be dealing with this issue. I just think freedom is more important. Rights are more important than wants.

As are the rights of a company that wants to enforce the use of pronouns. They can choose this brand of politics. And it clearly IS a political issue.
Yeah, I realised shortly after posting that comment that there's no need to reach for a metaphor or analogy; almost everyone insists on having a certain set of pronouns applied to them. Usually there's no friction because people instinctively use the ones we prefer, but that doesn't mean we're not ready to make the demand if necessary. (Try calling a random male colleague 'she' -- or a random female colleague 'he' -- for a week or two, and see how it goes down.)
Sure, it was the master plan to light their reputation on fire in a single week
I don't think that's what I wrote, no?
I still speak my mind openly in the work place and invariably I find that most people are actually delighted when they realise they can have open conversations with me without fear of judgement. The vast majority of people are still entirely reasonable.

Of course you never know if you’re going to say the wrong thing to the wrong person, but I don’t go to work to make friends and I certainly don’t go there to be intimidated by bullies.

I can count the number of unreasonable people I’ve had to deal with on the knuckles of one finger and they all skulked away pretty quickly when they realised I was standing up to them.

I’m not trying to downplay what you’re saying. I think there is a culture of fear and I think it’s been stoked deliberately to a certain extent, but I also think it’s a lie. Most of the people you work with are probably like you. That may also explain why you don’t notice them ;)
More specifically, the value of your labour minus the profit that the capitalist wants to make off your labour
Who says it’s a no politics work place? That’s not what the reporting this week suggests - just that it’s a “don’t disagree with the bosses” workplace.
It seems to be a misconception, that China can unilaterally inflict economic damage without suffering some of the same. For a similar scenario, consider the effect that Trump's tariffs and trade war had on both the Chinese and American economies.
"which somehow fails to mention that the owner is a Covid hoaxer (he believes that doctors have been falsely labeling deaths as Covid-related) and has brazenly violated masking rules, and did not require employees to wear masks" - I could tell, this author strikes right where the problem is: his personal biases.
I think an important part you might’ve missed is that the tag has to be away from its owner to be considered stalking you. If two strangers ride a train together, their air tags won’t be considered stalking each other.
What's the Big Idea? (Bill Gross' idealab! – 1999)
Came here to agree with this, there are laws against the federal government setting discriminatory minimums like this. In the eyes of just about any federal judge the original suggestion would get the entire bill shot down. Also people in this thread talking about how they think this is fair based on experience or cause "teens are stupid" thats entirely misguided of you all to think, there are kids who start working in some states LEGALLY at 14.5 years old, example: N.C. so when they are 16 or 17 they can legally be paid the same 'juvenile' minimum wage? No fast food company or grocery store will actively pay them more if they don't have to and that means less raises and how would all these companies even be monitored and audited for the crossover on ones 18th birthday? What about kids who are emancipated for their parents/legal guardians? What about kids who drop out of school and work? Do they all deserve to make less just because of their age? Geez, the actual obliviousness of people on this site is astonishing sometimes.
I’m not really answering your question here, but the best PHP CMS IMHO is Processwire, bar none, and I’ve used pretty much everything under the sun over the last 10+ years. Nothing else gets out the way and let’s you get on with the job in such an elegant way. I like their model as well, they essentially support their development through useful and elegant commercial plugins for things like caching, form builder, pro drafts, etc. The caching module is really worth every penny and then some.

It’s got a beautifully simple API and templating system that really lets you tackle and manage projects how you want to tackle them.

We’ve had production sites with thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of daily hits running off it for nearly a decade and had pretty much zero problems with it that I can remember. I’m confused why more people don’t use it. Sometimes I wonder if people like to make their lives difficult and use the latest shiny new thing just so they can use the latest shiny new thing.

We’ve even utilised it in non traditional ways as well, due to its flexibility - for instance we developed a few games (UE4 and Unity) for clients where we set up and managed various game properties for objects, enemy behaviour, etc. that games could then easily pull in dynamically as JSON allowing a quick and easy way for non developers to play with underlying game variables while play testing with no real programming experience. The simple tree hierarchy system, supplemented with things like repeaters, standard fields and in built selector functionality really makes it easy for anybody to get a handle on it in under ten minutes and feel at ease.

We’ve integrated it with horrendously bad client SSO systems with minimal effort as well, to speak of it’s somewhat fringe abilities.

The community is great as well, no politics and very active.

Disclosure: I’ve got no commercial interests in it, other than it’s made day to day life much easier and I’ll sing it’s praises at any opportunity.
The big problem with this discussion is that it is inherently very divisive. Should the nation invade a "malicious" regime to "free" the people or wait for them to find their own way, even if it might lead to more suffering? Is Islam or Atheism the right way? There is no good answer but there are very strong opinions. Discussing those at work will lead to infighting and disagreements between coworkers, as well as a lot of time spent (or, from a company-profit-perspective, wasted) on political activism. Especially since the people with these strong opinions a very happy to annoy you to help their cause or attack you for "standing by and letting it happen". This is bad for everyone involved.

That being said, there's no clear no line, I agree with you. Some political issues are related to the work place - unions come to mind - and those should not be excluded. Disallowing those is probably illegal in most places anyway and Basecamp, by the way, did explicitly exclude issues which are related to work.

But I think the general idea is that yes, you should keep politics (and religion) separated from work, as far as possible. That does not mean that you can not talk about it on your lunch break or after work or that you're not allowed to unionize. But you should not make your coworker uncomfortable because she/he likes guns and you think only maniacs do so.
Apple Firestorm is even wider but it doesn't have SMT. I guess they just don't care.
> The best GPS resolution available to civilians is about 8 meters (26 feet) - and that's under the best, most ideal situation using the best GPS receiver and a large antenna... things a small cell phone in a pocket or bag doesn't have.

I am not sure where you got this from but that is incorrect - the accuracy (or resolution) depends entirely on the number of satellites and/or augmentation systems you're tapped into, and how strong / clear those signals are. It can vary from a few kilometres down to a few centimetres.

Back in the 90's "Selective Availability" was a thing but it has since been removed.

See https://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/performance/accuracy/

Also - most modern phones can and do tap into the major providers (Galileo, Glonass, GPS etc), towers, WiFi spots, beacons and use all of these to give a a VERY accurate position of where the device is.

Edit: Might mention I worked first hand on indoor tracking of users, and a warehouse project for optimising worker picking - we were able to easily distinguish where a person was in a busy retail setting down to which section of a clothes rack they were selecting clothes from, and exactly where a worker was in a very interference-heavy (metals) warehouse floor using the above mentioned technologies.
In this example, the accuser isn't accusing the gay man. He'd be complaining to HR about politics at work. It was legal to fire someone for being gay up last year.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/15/supreme-court-rules-workers-...
wouldn't you just scale back commitments as a business and push back ship dates?
Right, and attention is not additive so the summed partial attention of millions of users unfortunately does not even equal the sustained full attention of one.

Mods, or "community mechanics", have to be our better nature, because our natural instinct, the things we're wired to prioritize under partial attention, is for indignation and sensationalism. In other words information about risk or excitement. because for fast paced life in a group where partial attention is the only possibility, such information probably has the highest utility.

but our better nature relative to hn has to be something that gratifies intellectual curiosity, something genuinely interesting. Something that if you were to spend your full attention immersed in a comment thread or reading an article would have the highest utility for you.

It's not exactly trivial. I don't know how they achieve it at all.

But they do somehow. Because I keep coming back here to learn something. and I look forward to coming here more than I do to a news site because I think there might be something interesting I can learn here. but on a news site it's probably more of the same.

People might complain about the power imbalance that moderators have about how they're this "privileged few" poking the community this way and that from up on high. But this can't possibly be true. Who wants the "privilege" of having it to be their job to stand against face and invite the abuse of the resentful? How can one person with a stick stand against the madding crowd? They can't. Any respect the moderators have from the community is earned certainly not "given" as a "privilege". Do they have power? yes they have power but that power only comes from the community respecting their decisions. And they use software to give that stick a multi-local reach.

Such no-moderation advocates would prefer absolute unmoderated freedom: an idyllic community self-regulated and self-moderated, we're no individual has the power besides the social power they can accumulate through their interactions, every other form of power must be trashed and rejected. such criticisms of moderation are necessarily selfish because the people advocating them can only see their local corner of the community. And they don't concern themselves with the well-being of anything outside of that. If anything outside of that is a miss they simply shrug it off return to their safe corner. It's their privilege to not have the responsibility to have to moderate. a privilege given to them by the good work the moderators do.

But if they had their way, you end up with a partitioned world of all isolated tribes and no global optima . so the cost of this freedom (that no-moderation supporters want), is the freedom of other people, everyone else, to be genuinely interested and have their intellectual curiosity gratified when they visit the site.

By corraling the community to work as a whole you can approach the global optima of submission quality for the metric of genuinely interesting.
Right now I'd say probably the middle class it hurts the most. They would have more cash savings.

High net worth individuals it would hurt less as they usually have way more in assets such as stocks. But in the middle class, their stock exposure is often limited to their 401k or retirement plan.

I know quite a few people who had a downpayment in cash waiting to buy a house before this all started and are still looking. That value of cash went down quite a lot over the past year. Houses are up 40-50% YOY in some cases here (Arizona).

If wages don't go up though, this will also hurt the poor significantly.
Lots of open ended questions here that I'm not sure how to interpret the motivation for...

How long should a company like GM that designs its own engines have to continue manufacturing replacement ones? That's not cheap... (etc.)

Thinking about a mature market where we do have right to repair is a good test of these questions and helps reveal the hidden complexities. GM makes replacement parts for a while. A thriving non-OEM market persists long after the manufacturer ceases making more.

This is distinctly different from the status quo in Apple-land, where they prohibit partners like Texas Instruments from manufacturing or selling units to anyone but Apple.

Note also that there is no legislation in front of us with explicit terms set in stone here, so while your questions are good ones to consider when drafting such legislation, they should preclude a right to repair bill passing into law.
I don’t think a gym benefits can be pretax. Maybe if the employer owns the gym. What a company can pay for and not have it count as compensation is more limited than you’d think.
School Apple ][ and commodore PET. Writing simple loops in Basic. Bought the 101 computer games book and finally my parents relented and bought a Microbee. I ended up selling a game I wrote for that, but lost or gave away everything in the early 1990s. Recently a conversation on ebay of all places lead me back to a copy of that game and I was able to run it in an emulator. It was written in basic and the source code was back in all its teenage glory. Its...unimpressive but my teensy bit of 8 bit history being preserved like that was quite a surprise.
Opensource.com has some good stuff. https://opensource.com/downloads/cheat-sheets
You've posted this twice and it's really looking like a hit job. What does this have to do with no politics at work?
Imagine being such an insufferable CEO/CTO that 1/3rd of your company quits after you blindside them with new policies and benefit changes in a public blog post.
>At least 1/3 of the staff, when confronted with their true relations with their management, then decided to quit.

At least 1/3 of staff, when offered either 3 or 6 months of salary just for switching employers, accepted it.

I feel like you'd get similar rates, potentially higher, at any employer recent incident or not. If you have the career power to quickly slot in to an equivalent job elsewhere, you just cut years off of your retirement date.

I don't think any "its really about" take can ignore that.
"Tesla already uses aluminum for power cabling because it’s cheap and lighter weight."

Ugh, really ? That offends my sensibilities ...
Wasmer Python
FWIW, DHH stated that only a handful of names were Asian. The vast majority of names on the list were English or Nordic. :|
Now "right to repair" includes not only designing devices to be easier to repair but also includes legacy software support? Where do we draw this line? If your M1 dies, you can't fab one yourself or run older software on it indefinitely.

If your IBM PC dies, you can definitely create a functionally exact clone based on publicly available information, and in fact many have done so, either virtually or physically.

IMHO if the manufacturer ceases to provide support, then it must open up the documentation and design, or allow all reverse-engineering of it.
mkl's point is that in the "woke religion" (for lack of a better term), a person who has transitioned is considered to have always been the gender they transitioned to, even before they began the transition (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliot_Page, where he is referred to as a "he" even in events before the transition).
It's not "cannot be overwritten ever". It's more "you can overwrite it using credentials stored in a safe location and never from the production environment".

Someone will always have permissions to remove or change the entries, just not easily and not in an automated daily process way.
Exactly this. What people don’t realize is this move is hardly political. It’s all about building a better business. When work is a safe space free from political flame wars, employees can actually focus on the one thing they were hired to do, and be happier doing it: write code, manage projects, etc.
> 2 tanks a week?

When I lived in Spring and commuted to the office at 610 North and I-45, it was 2 tanks a week for the 35 minute drive. That was 7 years ago.

> 200 bucks a month for shit tier food? Ever heard of cooking?

One week of food for one person:

2lb white rice, $1.5
1lb beans, $1.25
2lb ground meat, $10

1gal milk, $4
1lb sharp cheddar, $5
1 loaf bread, $3.5

total... $25. Times four weeks, you get $100. I never claimed to be good at cooking.

> 1400 a month rent?

Due on the 1st, late on the 3rd.

> "I should be able to have extra money for fun"

There's nothing wrong with wanting extra money for fun.

> "I blow my money on things I can't afford and then blame the world for being broke."

Minimum wage doesn't have money to blow things on things they can't afford though.
>"Collectively, we should be thinking of different funding models, different ownership scenarios, and different growth imperatives. Failure to do so is simply resigning ourselves to another round of this rigged game."

I don't accept the verdict that these economic hardships necessarily mean that "capitalism is broken" or "rigged" or that we need to rethink "ownership scenarios" (whatever exactly that means). The economy is a vastly complicated system of countless trades per day, and there are a lot of variables in flux that are making things very crappy for a lot of people. But I fear trying to make things better by blaming it on capitalism being "broken" or a "rigged game" is more likely to make things worse.
...and to achieve that, Bitcoin has a backwards approach to security where the honest parties must work harder than the attackers, which ultimately means that nobody can confidently say that the system is secure unless a majority of energy produced on Earth is being devoted to honest parties mining Bitcoin.

It is also wrong to suggest that the bank in Chaum's system is a "trusted third party," as if the bank can unilaterally break any security property of the system. In fact the bank in an ecash system is very much constrained. The bank cannot violate a user's privacy (in the sense of linking a user's transactions) unless the user attempts to spend the same coin twice. The bank's ability to claim that a user was trying to conduct some kind of double-spending attack is also constrained (the no-frame-ups property) so that a user must actually attempt to double spend a coin for the bank to produce evidence of such a crime. It is also possible to create a distributed trust model where several parties must jointly issue the coins (threshold blind signatures).

Unlike Bitcoin, the security model of ecash is well-defined and follows the basic philosophy of cryptographic security: the computational difficult of attacking the system grows exponentially with the computational work performed by honest parties. Put another way, the energy expended in an ecash system will grow linearly with the number of transactions being performed in the system, and the incentive is to reduce the energy consumption by finding more efficient ways to process transactions. If the cost of a well-defined, rigorous security model, a system that incentivizes minimizing energy consumption, and features that Bitcoin can never actually support (e.g. direct peer-to-peer payments that do not require an Internet connection or any communication with any third parties), is to have a central bank or consortium of banks that issues the coins, you can count me in.
I bet Coinbase didn’t blindside their employees with a public blog post
I'm not judging the people that left - sorry if that was received wrongly. I'm trying to say that from the perspective of the company, they probably see this deal less bad than you do.
I know it's not helpful to just go "well duh" to things like this. That being said, I feel like that's pretty far from surprising. Menial repetitive things can be incredibly draining.
The average age of a fast food worker is 29.5.

https://www.davemanuel.com/2011/04/21/the-average-age-of-a-f...