tonysdg

It's terrible from a correctness perspective, sure. But from a business perspective, that could mean $50 million of revenue not-lost to a flaw you (as an owner/operator) can't do much about. Sure, it could lead to an exploit like this, but I'd wager a cost-benefit analysis for almost any organization (except maybe CIA/NSA types) would support this design choice.

That's not to say it's a good design choice, but it's certainly a defensible one IMO. You can have the most secure OS in the world, but if no one wants to use it, all you've got is a very secure waste of hard drive space.

I can't say whether or not Protonmail is secure, but I'll warn you right now OP: this is a bit of a loaded question on HN. Don't expect a straight answer.

I don't follow - what does Github and its ownership have to do with anything? I could be wrong, but I was under the impression Linus mirrors on Github just for convience's sake.

I do know that Linus's Github repo is not the official public repository for the kernel -- that's kernel.org's job. And FWIW, relations between the Linux and MS kernel devs have (to my understanding) never been better, especially since the Spectre/Meltdown reveals.

To play devil's advocate, that's because the cache of a modern processor is highly optimized for TDM, not SDM. Perhaps a redesigned cache hierarchy could resolve this problem (at the expense of awful TDM performance).

Option 3: Did they elect those politicians because they were concerned about the idea of crime? Fear is a powerful motivator; I'd be interested to see how areas that elected "tough on crime" politicians correlate to actual crime rates.

Generally speaking, that's where FPGAs excel. You get a good chunk of the speedup that comes with designing your own circuit at a lower cost than actual ASICs (at least for protoyping and low volume batches).

When the author says someone "stops identifying as X", I have to wonder what exactly that means. Does it mean they no longer wish to emphasize that piece of their identity? Did their actual beliefs change? Or are they simply hiding those pieces of themselves? The answers (and implications) are fascinating.

> That method would need to be secure, reliable, and traceable.

And that's why it will never happen. This is one of my biggest complaints about the Hacker News community: so many of us are engineers who see a problem and immediately think "here's a solution, technical or otherwise."

We can't "solve" humanity -- it's pure hubris to think otherwise. Any national ID will run the same risks the befall SSNs, passports, licenses, passwords, or any other form of identification. Which, simply put, is that the weakest link is always the person behind them. All it takes is one screw-up -- your passport falls out of your bag on a busy street, a thief breaks into your home and steals the safe with your SSN card inside, someone accidentally makes a list of password hashes public -- and the "secure, reliable, traceable" goes out the window.

I don't have a solution. But I think those of us who are engineers owe it to the general public to stop kidding ourselves into thinking we can come up with "solutions" -- technical or otherwise -- that aren't (1) flawed in some other fashion, (2) unacceptable due to societal norms, or (3) require the elimination of personal freedoms and liberties that at least we in the U.S./Canada/Europe seem to enjoy.

Pretty much anything from Digilent. I've got an old Spartan6 board that has a boatload of horsepower. If you want to get fancy, look at the Zedboard family -- FPGA wrapped around ARM cores.

You would certainly hope; and yet, long uptimes unforeseen by designers can have devestating consequences:

> A government investigation revealed that the failed intercept at Dhahran had been caused by a software error in the system's handling of timestamps. The Patriot missile battery at Dhahran had been in operation for 100 hours, by which time the system's internal clock had drifted by one-third of a second. Due to the missile's speed this was equivalent to a miss distance of 600 meters...the Scud impacted on a makeshift barracks in an Al Khobar warehouse, killing 28 soldiers.

> As a stopgap measure, the Israelis had recommended rebooting the system's computers regularly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-104_Patriot#Failure_at_Dha...

I don't mean to be rude, but if you're worried about the "do not track" setting identifying, you honestly shouldn't be on the internet. Or you should be using it like rms does [1] (scroll to "How I use the internet").

[1] https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

> First of all it's best done face to face, because you don't want to be misunderstood, and you want to give the other party a fair chance at replying.

You're making an assumption here: that one is leaving for amicable reasons (e.g., a better paying job elsewhere, a new career path, going back to school, etc.). There's another mindset that this sort of company is perfect for: "I don't give a hoot about my soon-to-be-ex-employer, I just want out."

In that case, a company like this might even be the better means of quitting -- as the saying goes, "if you don't have anything nice to say, say nothing at all." This company provides (IMO) a valuable ways of communicating without having to get personal feelings involved (at least for the departing employee).

Great for normal users, awful for disabled users. A touchscreen is light-years ahead of mice for individuals who lack or are incapable of fine motor control skills.

> then you'd have to elevate it to get it out.

> It would turn into beer

I'm confused - are you suggesting reasons you should use a big hole in the ground or reasons you shouldn't use a big hole in the ground?

>And even then, you need to trust the machine.

At the end of the day, it even goes further than that -- you have to trust the people who build the machines.

Ken Thompson said it best in his Turing Award talk: https://www.archive.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p7...

Honestly, is there actually any chance of there _not_ being an environmental disaster by the end of the 21st century? I'm not saying we shouldn't keep trying, but the political willpower just doesn't exist. Significant portions of the worlds' population either:

- Depend on CO2-emitting technologies for their daily sustenance and/or existence

- Flat-out deny that humanity is exacerbating climate change

- Are completely apathetic to the issue since it doesn't affect their lives (at this time)

IMHO, there's an argument to be made that researchers are better off coming up with "band-aids" that can be applied in 50-60 years when first-world countries finally run out of ways to ignore the problem (i.e., when Wall Street floods, French vineyards stop producing, Saudi oil wells spontaneously combust, and sunbathing for more than 5 minutes, even with SPF 50 applied, results in 2nd degree burns).

Not to be rude, but the science appears to be against you here. Wikipedia covers the "hockey stick controversy"[1] in rather meticulous detail, with the end of the introduction noting:

> More than two dozen reconstructions, using various statistical methods and combinations of proxy records, have supported the broad consensus shown in the original 1998 hockey-stick graph, with variations in how flat the pre-20th century "shaft" appears.[12][13] The 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report cited 14 reconstructions, 10 of which covered 1,000 years or longer, to support its strengthened conclusion that it was likely that Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the 20th century were the highest in at least the past 1,300 years.[14] Over a dozen subsequent reconstructions, including Mann et al. 2008 and PAGES 2k Consortium 2013, have supported these general conclusions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy

> With scarcity, you need to have a measure of success, otherwise everyone could just say they were a scientist and get a six figure salary to do nothing. Any metric you choose will be gamed.

As a current grad studrnt, I'm calling BS. We (meaning academics, even the ones gaming the system) _know_ what strong, reproducible, well-designed research projects look like. It doesn't take a genius to develop an experiment, run it, document what happened, and publish _all_ of the results. Hell, you learned the basics in middle school -- pick an independent variable, tweak it, then see what happens to the dependent variables.

Now it's obviously not that simple -- isolating just one independent variable is practically impossible much of the time -- but the concept of documenting EVERYTHING that you tried should be obvious. There's absolutely zero impetus to share all of that information, however, especially when you only have 12 pages in a conference paper to write up everything. So instead you go fishing, and you run a boatload of tests, and you see which ones "solve" the problem, and you write up just those tests, ignoring all the failures and the false starts.

It pisses me off, to be honest, and it's just one of the many reasons I'm trying to get out of here as soon as I can.

I remember reading a blog post somewhere describing the problem with modern recommendation engines being their reactive nature. Say you purchase a cell phone on Amazon -- they'll start showing you other cell phones, cell phone accessories, more electronics, etc. The problem is, you just bought a phone -- you don't need 5 more, and you max need 1 or 2 cases. So the recommendations are garbage, since the engine has no way of knowing what your current mindset is and what you actually might be interested in.

In hindsight, that's obvious, but it struck me at the time. I don't ever want to see my thoughts get read by a computer (personal choice), but until such technology exists, recommendation engines will continue to suck.

After reading the WSJ version of this article, I can see the argument in-favor: quarterly earnings reports put more weight on hitting short-term goals over long-term investment. That's just basic human nature, I suppose.

Yet flat out abolishing them seems a terrible price to pay in terms of transparency. Perhaps a middle ground, based on the size of the company in terms of revenue? Or some other (less onerous, I guess) means of reporting -- in quantifiable terms -- the health of a business each quarter?

It's not really that terrible of a concept -- some of the earliest high-level languages (e.g., COBOL) were designed to be "readable" by less-technical staff. It just requires careful design and structure.

IMO, it only falls apart (and becomes such a nightmare) because of the imprecision of spoken & written word. Computers don't understand idioms, colloquialisms, and the like, and so non-technical staff are tricked into thinking a language/program can do more than it actually can do.

> Business Insider has contacted Apple for comment. The company declined to comment when approached by The Chronicle.

Either the story is balderdash, or Apple knows how bad any explanation will look. It's probably just easier for the reporters to ask a source in the local government.

I'm not advocating for room searches or intrusion of privacy, but the fact of the matter is all of those cameras and security personnel still weren't enough to detect the worst mass shooter in history. I don't have a better solution unfortunately, and I think these room searches are a complete invasion of privacy, but my point is that the evidence contradicts you.

Given the problem, this seems like a reasonable action on the part of the NYC City Council. But I'm confused by section on congestion pricing:

> Many experts believe congestion pricing is the best way for New York City to fix congestion and secure the funds needed to fix the subway. Mr. Johnson supports the idea, but Mr. de Blasio has opposed it. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who controls the subway, has said he will push for congestion pricing...

Why does de Blasio oppose it? It seems like another reasonable approach to tackling congestion -- heck, it's the public version of building private toll roads -- with the added bonus of providing funds to improve public transportation.

Still wouldn't work probably -- think of how many times the average person misplaces their car keys in a given year. Now give them a piece of hardware, that they're only going to use every 2 years (which is a stretch given Americans' voting patterns, so realistically it's every 4 years if ever), and tell them to (1) keep it safe and (2) remember where they put it.

If you're going to quote Randall Munroe, at least include a link ;-) https://xkcd.com/1357/

I'd also add that this begs a serious question: who _do_ you trust to own the signal? A multinational corporation? A government? No one? Everyone?

Furthermore, how do you rectify disagreements over that trust? I may trust a multinational corporation (especially if I own stock in it and can vote on its directors), but you may trust your government, and our neighbor may not trust anyone.

Both of those questions need to be "solved" (if such a thing is even possible), but that's (obviously) a lot easier said than done.

Could you link if you have it? I'm genuinely curious.

I'm also suspicious -- what stops the aforementioned individuals from finding another website/forum? I seem to remember hearing that after Reddit closed down several of the more unsavory/flat-out-awful subreddits, a large contingent of those users moved to another site (can't remember which though).

FWIW, I support clamping down on hate speech, but only if it's accompanied by some form of education (otherwise, you're just hiding the problem).

Yeah, this strikes me as a bit of FUD. And also fairly low on the totem pole of "things the DNC should be warning candidates about".

I'd rank any or all of these higher:

- Don't open email attachments

- Use a strong password + 2FA

- Turn on automatic updates

- Don't run your own email/web server, contract it out to the pros

- Vet your donors, especially if they're dropping big bucks in return for "access"

- If you ain't comfy with it being on the front page of the Times/WSJ/CNN/Fox/Breitbart/HuffPo/NPR/InfoWars/RT/Youtube, don't (1) send it in an email, (2) say it at a campaign event, (3) include it in an SMS, (4) really consider it at all.

Same goes for the RNC and any aspiring politician, to be honest. But worrying that the Chinese or Russians have installed backdoors in a ZTE or Huawai phone? Eh, they've got easier and more precise ways to hack your stuff.

> Spaces: The animation tells the user what is going on! Having the entire screen change instantly would be confusing for the vast majority of users.

That's an interesting point, and it makes me wonder if there's a level of nuance to be found here. For example, animations are acceptable iff they do not extend the time required to perceive the requested action.

In other words, it's already going to take me some fraction of a second to perceive any change; animations within that fraction of a second are perfectly fine. Anything that extends the change past that fraction of a second, however, is eating into my productivity (or at least, so the author would claim).