Hacker News Reader

throwawaylinuxon 100% coral mortality found in coral reef off Florida as ocean temperatures soar

> The reefs will move north. Not to be flip, and say that climate change is not an issue, but here the planet can and will adjust--if not on the timeline us humans (and humans who make our livings off tourism) would like.

I'm not sure about that. The vast majority of coral reef destruction around the world has not been due to climate change but other human activity. Fishing, as well as agriculture, forestry, erosion, cities, dredging and shipping, that cause sediment and nutrient and chemical poisons.

throwawaylinuxon Zenbleed

Not really if that's an attack you're concerned about, because guests can attack the hypervisor via the same mechanisms. You would need to gang schedule to ensure all threads of a core were only either in host or guest.

throwawaylinuxon Fancy quartz countertops are killing people who make them, doctors say

Carpentry, cabinet making, building a house, are not very precise. And they can be quite varied in terms of exactly what sinks and stoves and other fittings are wanted where. It wouldn't be feasible to get exact measurements, send them to the factory, and then get back a precisely fitting top. At least not in remodels and one-off custom builds.

throwawaylinuxon Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’

> not sure it was revolutionary,

I'm sure it was not.

> but it sure was helpful for example for getting alerts to breaking news stories and such

Yes, presumably the breaking news that the government-corporate propaganda machine wanted us to see.

Seeing earthquakes and mass shootings and the like a few minutes before legacy media was an interesting novelty but not much actual practical value and not something that will bring down capitalism/billionaires/fascists/etc.

throwawaylinuxon The IBM mainframe: How it runs and why it survives

The hardware is quite radically different. It's not the mechanical form factor or bulk electrical and cooling of it, but the silicon.

The processor checkpoints state, and if an error is detected it can be rolled back and the checkpoint moved to another physical processor and re-started transparently to software. Stores are tracked all the way down to "RAID memory" (actually called RAIM), whereas in other CPUs they get punted off at the L1 cache. Practically every component and connection is redundant. There are stories of mainframe drawers being hauled to particle accelerators and the beam switched on while they're running. Quite amazing machines.

Not to say that has more value than the software (I don't know one way or the other), but the hardware is no gimmick.

throwawaylinuxon Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’

Twitter has not been some revolutionary (in the political sense) device since long before Musk bought it, if it ever was. Actually the opposite, it was shown to act as an arm of the states that support the status quo.

throwawaylinuxon All foster kids in California can now attend any state college for free

It's actually that "billionaires" will somehow produce a whole lot more things and pay for it all for everybody else, absolving themselves of any further rational thought or moral responsibility to those with less than themselves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee8GedvPmBU

throwawaylinuxon Young people are flocking to astrology

Just when you thought you'd seen peak Hacker News...

throwawaylinuxon ldd arbitrary code execution (2009)

How much do you actually know about this? Have you read the ELF spec or written anything with libelf, hacked on a loader, a linker? Considered the actual problems with having this hard coded vs alternatives?

I ask because ELF and unix dynamic linking is a pretty well thought out set of specifications and processes and it's a huge body of work. It can certainly be criticized, but calling it an afterthought because of .interp doesn't seem very charitable, just trying to understand if that's an informed opinion and if so it would be interesting to hear more.

throwawaylinuxon ldd arbitrary code execution (2009)

> The fact that an executable needs to explicitly specify the "interpreter", instead of that being something under control of the OS loader, doesn't seem like a good way of doing it;

The OS loader does control the permissions of what can be read and executed. And the user can execute a file. Why would it be better if you had to execute the loader explicitly to run a program? The same security problem would apply if you convinced somebody else to execute your malicious code. Seems like pretty harmless syntactic convenience.

The issue of ldd executing the program I guess is a thing that could be tightened to avoid foot shooting. Lots of unix programs traditionally were happy to give you lots of rope though.

throwawaylinuxon ldd arbitrary code execution (2009)

Well dynamic linking and most things in unix is an afterthought by definition because the first unix system did not have them.

That doesn't seem to be what you mean though in context, but I'm not sure what you do mean. You don't like it or don't think it was designed well because dynamic linking is done in userspace?

throwawaylinuxon FBI improperly used 702 surveillance powers on US senator

> The problem with term limits is that they discourage the lower classes from getting involved in politics.

I think that ship has sailed.

> Only the wealthy can afford to just take a 4-6 year break from their career.

Many elected political offices get paid a reasonably good salary, higher than median wages. Many people change careers after 5 or 10 years too. Even the commoners. So I'm don't buy this assertion.

throwawaylinuxon Pressure and vacuum marination does not work (2016)

Momentum? Quantum tunneling of the flavor atoms?

throwawaylinuxon FBI improperly used 702 surveillance powers on US senator

The problem is, when they've divided the country so completely, they have 50% of the population cheering them on no matter who they are "getting back at". Sad.

throwawaylinuxon Oxide Computer: Docs

> I think quite often when we assume 'most want to fair bit of control' is just not true. Enterprises want something that just works, they want control if they can't have something that just works.

That's not what I'm assuming here. Read carefully, I divide the market into 3 categories. Those who support their own VM image software and hypervisors, those who support neither, and those who support VM image but not hypervisor.

First is Amazon, Google, Facebook and the like (and it's not an assumption we can see their public contributions to KVM, QEMU, etc., and hear their talks about some of what they use internally). Second is "enterprise" who wants something that just works. Third is ? and would they want to support their software on a niche hypervisor?

> If that was the case and nobody running any of these would run their rack, then I wouldn't think they would not have received any funding. But I don't know enough about these certification process to really comment.

Well it is the case that enterprise (supported) software is not just supported on any hypervisor. https://access.redhat.com/articles/973163 RHEL runs on their own KVM as well as MS, VMware, some cloud vendors. Some application software also gets certified to hardware and hypervisors, not just operating system (e.g., SAP does this).

> Non of these come with a fully integrated rack.

It's not fully integrated if it doesn't come with the guest software though, is it?

> The competition would be somebody willing to buy a rack of Dell servers with VMWare software. Or somebody willing to buy a rack of Dell server and then use RedHat and set up all their own cloud style infrastructure.

Right. And the problem for Oxide is that the competition will have fully certified and supported operating system and application software for their virtual machines.

throwawaylinuxon Quench of LHC inner triplet magnet causes a small leak with major consequences

> Don't you think the Swiss and French governments wouldn't have thought about safety almost 70 years ago?

This isn't an argument. 70 years ago France was conducting atmospheric nuclear tests that caused people and inhabited land to be exposed radioactive fallout.

throwawaylinuxon Will a prompt that enables GPT-4 to solve easy Sudoku puzzles be found?

> The title is funny to me. We should consider a new computation complexity class for LLMs. Let's call the ones that can be solved with a prompt, Promptable. For the problems that we cannot reliably solve with a single prompt yet, let's call them non-deterministic promptable, or NP.

Promptable is old hat now. I propose an entirely new class of problems which is whether you can prompt GPT to construct a prompt for GPT that can solve a problem. I call it Deep-Promptability™ (patent pending). The "order" is defined by how many levels of prompting can you solve the problem in, so if a problem is order-3 deep-promptable then you can prompt GPT to construct a prompt for GPT that will construct a prompt that allows GPT to solve it.

throwawaylinuxon Will a prompt that enables GPT-4 to solve easy Sudoku puzzles be found?

> However, it apparently can write a program using the Z3 SAT solver to find a solution.

Not that it's unimpressive in general that a LLM can write a program from a prompt like that, but for this particular juxtaposition it doesn't seem like it's especially interesting or impressive that it can write such a program. A SAT program is basically just re-stating the the rules in a particular form. It doesn't even have to be able to apply those rules. The solver does the hard work.

throwawaylinuxon Oxide Computer: Docs

Do I have it right that they ship their own hypervisor (that's based on maybe Solaris, not KVM) as firmware? Let's assume a very small team can compete on a technical level, it still seems like it could cut out a lot of the potential market.

I can't imagine that large cloud / "web scale" companies would want that. Most want a fair bit of control of their own hypervisor and management stacks based around KVM. And "enterprise" type companies are going to have issues with certification I would have thought -- will RedHat, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, etc certify their supported products on top of this hypervisor? Seems like a difficult and expensive process.

So what's left? Companies that support their own virtual machine software but don't support their own hypervisor and don't like what's available from vmware or Microsoft or RedHat. A small niche. Or are my assumptions wrong?

throwawaylinuxon Oxide Computer: Docs

So what has been designed properly and what hasn't?

throwawaylinuxon Stanford president resigns over manipulated research, will retract 3 papers

You can tell he's not a real journalist because he wasn't digging dirt and attacking anybody who questioned The Science™ or carrying water for the ruling class.

throwawaylinuxon Ill in England? Your Location Can Determine If You Live or Die

I think about flat since Labour was last in power, yes. And it is adjusted for inflation. Seems to have been no real "defunding" going on. And if it was underfunded in the first place, a 3x adjusted increase in spending must have done wonders for it, there must be significant improvements in key objective metrics since then, have there been?

throwawaylinuxon The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

That's the spirit. And you're welcome, you'll find that you feel much better when not upsetting yourself about things like this.

throwawaylinuxon The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

> If it happens both ways then it doesn't matter why,

Wrong.

[snip bitterness]

While we're dispensing with unsolicited advice about what is and is not important in how we think, you can just choose to not be upset by this stuff. The fact is here that lots of people are getting irrationally upset by the this GDP story. You can make peace with that and just move on without having to start bashing America or Americans. Ranting about how you think the average American has a hard time imagining more to life than money and things like that is just deeply weird. Fascinating though, so feel free not to take my advice and continue with it.

throwawaylinuxon Ill in England? Your Location Can Determine If You Live or Die

> The people doing the defunding say that it's defunding. They're proud of it. They wrote a manifesto saying they were going to do it, and then they did it.

Oh? Do what, fund the health system at almost record levels?

> It's pretty blatant dishonesty to say that healthcare hasn't been defunded, and then only focus on NHS provision of healthcare while ignoring public health, social care, nursing care, etc.

It would be if someone had done that. Incidentally, are you saying that NHS has not been defunded? You wouldn't be very popular with said ideologues either then.

throwawaylinuxon The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

> The post is ostensibly about GDP growth. However, if you read the comments both here and on Twitter you’ll see that we humans are quick to jump from cold economic facts of GDP into more broad points about economic stagnation.

I can't seem to read the twitter comments but I don't really see that here, at least in top level comments it seems to be all people who are quick to jump from that to making excuses or trying to rationalize why these numbers are "bad".

I don't know what would be the problem with talking about economic stagnation though, significant differences in GDP growth between ~comparably advanced economies doesn't seem like a bad starting point for that, does it? I notice you didn't actually reply to such a comment, but even so I don't know why you would bring life expectancy into GDP stagnation either. There's certainly a fairly strong correlation and almost certainly causal relationship, but nobody seems to be confusing GDP with the sole driver of life expectancy or believe that GDP tells "the whole story". So it seems like a weird thing to bring up, you could also bring up wheat production and point out that it isn't fixed to GDP, because it also doesn't tell you that story.

throwawaylinuxon The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

> I actually think it's the opposite, I always see Americans getting really snarky about Europe, I could go back and find plenty of examples but I have better things to do.

I'm responding to a (one of the many) cases of people being strangely upset and irrational about a simple fact about the US doing better in this one metric recently. There is no "opposite" about it, I never said it does not happen the other way around, I'm questioning why it is happening this way around in this thread. And again that is making people upset and bringing up other unrelated things, which is quite ironic really.

> Personally I think average Americans have a hard time imaging a world where there is more to life than money.

Personally I think it's sad that so many "educated and enlightened" people are okay with making vile accusations and generalizations about others they know nothing about.

I know a bunch of Americans and almost all are warm, friendly, generous. Some very driven, very few who struck me as being all about money. I feel sad that many have been to feel ashamed of themselves by this kind of casual bullying.

> Ultimately whenever I see these "murica" centric posts, I remember them flying in emergency medical supplies from China and everybody being upset about how the worlds greatest super power didn't have enough supplies for their own medical staff.

I don't quite understand what you're getting at. You're upset by the fact that the US economy measured by GDP grew much faster than the EU recently, but you take comfort from the fact that China manufactures a lot of things that other countries buy such as medical equipment and there were shortages of various goods during Covid. I don't know what to make of that but I'm sure there's some interesting psychology behind it.

throwawaylinuxon The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X

What is a "frame trap", and why do people get irrationally upset by the US doing well at something or the EU doing poorly?

This post is about GDP growth. What has life expectancy got to do with it, and how are you contributing to any discussion? Has anybody here said that "GDP is the most important indicator"?

throwawaylinuxon Ill in England? Your Location Can Determine If You Live or Die

https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/news-item/the-past-present-...

Looks like there has been no slashing going on, even adjusted for inflation and demographics. And the conservative governments after 2010 kept funding at about the same levels as the Labour governments set it at. Fancy that.

I wonder what governments have had to show for this massive 2x increase in adjusted healthcare spending. Vast improvements to the system, surely.

throwawaylinuxon Underwater ears everywhere

I assure you that non-Americans feel the same need to drag American politics into every discussion.