achille

> "At the beginning of time and the center of every black hole lies a point of infinite density called a singularity"

my understanding was that this was d̶i̶s̶p̶r̶o̶v̶e̶n̶ mathematically incorrect:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38636225

- sabine's take: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nz55jONtFAU

edit: disproven -> mathematically incorrect

Just listened to Vogue on my headphones, and I'm unable to notice anything unique about the soundscape of this song. What do you folks hear and when do you hear it? At what point in the song?

It's more significant than that. These self-replicating alife systems will dominate energy consumption and will be the largest forms of life.

Same thing happened to OpenAI. Will you steer clear of OpenAI forever as well?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35294082

They can absolutely outperform gpt4 for specific use cases.

Are the PDFs of the posters available?

Absolutely agree that this is an incredibly hard skill in any medium, digital or otherwise.

It's also possible that Van Eyck may have perceived the world the same way we do, and the inclusion of small details such as the beads came only due to his artistic choice of tools. Conversely if you were trained to the same tool for sketching you would be forced to include the beads by way of process -- even if you had not noticed them before.

The author claims that Van Eyck notices details we'd otherwise miss out and uses the Arnolfini portrait as supporting evidence. However it's possible that artifacts such as the beads appear not because he saw the world differently, but due to his artistic choice of tools. He may have used an optical projection device, a "perspective machine" -- Which means that his process may not have allowed for skipping the inclusion of the beads.

See:

- https://theconversation.com/the-mysterious-optical-device-ja...

- https://hal.univ-lorraine.fr/hal-03287031/file/VanEyckPerspe...

- https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-31903-2_...

Technical explanation by minutephysics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT19VwBAqKA

The amount of privacy is configurable, and researchers who would like to tune it (in either direction) can make a plea so the public can decide the amount of privacy loss they're willing give up in order to aid research.

Each culture is different and has different tolerances for privacy and amount of intrusiveness.

This is a standard feature of many browsers, including Safari.

E.g: On OSX you can download a .dmg file or .zip file, and when opening the OS will warn: "XYZ is an application downloaded from the internet. Are you sure you want to open it?". The information about the origin of the file comes from extended attributes.

See: https://www.idownloadblog.com/2017/04/20/fix-application-fro...

How many projects would be affected if the Supreme Court sides with Oracle and rules that APIs can't be reimplemented?

Java is open source, but copyright is retained by Oracle. Would this affect say, Amazon's ability to rip off the MongoDB API? What about open source x86 emulators? (Intel IP) Hercules IBM emulator? Any of the Nintendo, SNES etc game emulators?

There's a book coming out in a few weeks with more details. The authors were provided with all the data.

What would you do with 1000 games that's not possible with 100?

> The change is estimated to impact about 85 percent of AT&T's 64.5 million postpaid phone lines in service, making for about $800 million in additional annual revenue.

85% * 64.5 million * $1.23 = 67 million

Where did the other 733 million come from?

Edit: Ah monthly fee; Annual revenue.

> but that also applies to the rotisserie chickens ($5/3lb vs grocery stores at 2lb).

It's a common myth that rotisserie chickens are cheaper than frozen. If you do the math you'll find that rotisserie chickens are slightly more expensive.

See: https://www.ams.usda.gov/mnreports/pywretailchicken.pdf

> Rotisserie, Under 2lb, Norwest cost is $5.73/lb on average

They got hacked years ago. I know this for sure because I'd used a unique email address to sign up on their website: equifax@<my name>.com

No one else had that email address. Guess what, I started getting phishing emails to that exact address.

Tried letting them know, but it went nowhere.

Not at all. I would argue the opposite. Ignoring it leads to ugly consequences. It's why we got Trump. For a lot of people, the idea of illegal immigrants cutting in line to get to the US, feels unfair and they took the bait.

Same thing here. Is it fair for me to get charged more than the next person for the same trip? Everyone understands the feeling of unfairness (even dogs [1]). Humans don't make perfect mathematical choices, which is why the entire field of behavioral economics exists, and it's why Uber will be eventually forced to provide even pricing, whether they like it or not.

[1] - http://www.pnas.org/content/106/1/340.full

Yes, it makes mathematical sense, but it feels bad at a visceral, gut level. From personal experience, when visiting some countries, taxis would quote 2x or 3x the standard fare just because they saw I was clearly a tourist.

This is essentially the same, except there isn't even an option for haggling.

That's a pretty neat study. Essentially they show how the placebo effect can have such a big impact on health.

Getting medicine treatment -> Rewards the brain -> Leads to increased production of antibodies -> Patient is healthier.

Edit: Found it. https://youtube.com/watch?v=SVYegdh2CbE

Does anyone know if there's a recording of the usenix talk given? (Referenced slides)

There's an excellent Radiolab Podcast that covers the same study, I'd highly recommend listening to it:

* http://www.radiolab.org/story/169879-patient-zero/

Note that the SEL4 kernel is only a small portion of this project. They've secured the entire stack, top to bottom.

HACMS leverages a number of other projects including the CompCert verifying C compiler, Verve OS Theorem prover, model checkers. You also need need proofs for the communication protocol, the IP stack, secured device drivers, memory protection units, control systems that can detect attacks, etc.

Just a proven kernel won't keep the helicopter flying, you've got to secure everything. Additionally you need to reason about execution time and memory constraints.

Slides: http://www.cyber.umd.edu/sites/default/files/documents/sympo...

Presentation from Kathleen Fisher, the researcher who's won the DARPA grant for the program:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqRdbgRPYw8

Just note that DNA itself is code and completely useless without an interpreter/compiler. The DNA is just a storage mechanism, the true complexity relies on the cell.

See: http://ds9a.nl/amazing-dna/

If we lost all cells but had DNA, we could not do anything with it. The same way that source code is useless if you don't have a compiler.

Could this be a plan for Netflix to even out the upstream & downstream traffic? Upstream traffic is significantly more expensive for ISPs to absorb (esp at the last mile). ISPs are demanding payment because they claim they're absorbing more traffic than they're sending back [1]. Netflix could just update their client to saturate upstream traffic while maintaining downstream traffic.

From the article: "But for some reason, its share of uploads went up substantially in the latest measurement while downloads remained level."

[1] - http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/07/how-co... Tier 1 networks have generally exchanged traffic with each other without payment if they send and receive roughly equal amounts of data. Schaeffer has claimed it's impossible for Comcast to be "in balance" with any other network because its own Internet service is designed for consumers to download far more than they upload

If you pay attention to the video, the card sends a notification to the phone with the transaction amount & merchant information.

Knowing the transaction amount is not possible from the "sender" portion of a magstripe. You're simply handing over a credit card number. The credit card amount is negotiated over the phone/internet between the bank & merchant.

This means that the Plastc card likely has one hardcoded number that switches payments serverside. Similar to the Wallaby card or Google Wallet card.

This works perfectly fine with chip & pin. The merchant charges the Plastc card which in turn forward the transaction to the correct bank.

I encourage folks to watch this tech talk by HP Research Labs on the discovery of the memristor and implementation details. It goes into the gory technical details, from the low level physics to the construction of the gates, the truth tables, and the high level computation possibilities once chips are assembled in a crossbar package.

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY

Until leaving Oracle about a year ago, I'd been doing a lot of development in PL/SQL, which is extremely similar and compiles to the same ADA bytecode (called DIANA).

Most of Oracle's E-Business Suite is written in PL/SQL, although some components are being re-written in Java (ADF) in the new Fusion Middleware stack.

If your company is using Oracle for payroll or financials (this includes lots of companies, including Apple, Google etc), it's likely some of the customizations have been developed recently, and they've been developed in PL/SQL. Many of the components in EBS have not changed in decades

So to answer your question, developers at Google right now are writing in Ada (well almost):

> https://www.google.com/about/careers/search/?#!t=jo&jid=1144...

It's not easy to rewrite either. Writing ERP software is extremely hard, because it can't be cleanly modeled in a few abstractions. There are a lot of edge cases. I would suggest reading Ward Cunningham's http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyIsPayrollHard

How dare they give you a free service, and then decide to charge for a revocation which they had said they would charge for (and is meaningless because by default all browsers ignore revocations).

Unfortunately for various historical fuckups, we consider self signed certificates to be more dangerous than cleartext unsecured http. Lots of scary warnings pop up. That is absurd. Starcom is helping fix this by issuing free certificates.

The Mozilla CA policy does not include a provision for obvious trolling and posturing. If Starcom were to be forced to revoke your certificate for free, why would anyone else (on any CA) ever pay for revocation?

You conveniently left out their next sentence "... many leading payment services allow user enumeration, including Paypal, Venmo, Square Cash, and many others..."

I caught amazon pulling this a while back and it was disappointing. Screenshots: http://imgur.com/a/fiPnD

Notice it's the same exact item#

    Not logged in : $19.23 + 6.99 shipping
    When Logged in: $27.85 + free shipping