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A collection of useful snippets, all in one place. GitHub Actions is a great CI/CD with many possibilities that can be used to solve the most non-trivial tasks. But some features are poorly documented or come with experience. The most interesting of the features will be reflected in this repository. 📚 Contents Tips Secrets Action options Strict Error Mode (Shell) Cache Dependencies Installing Dependencies in Node.js Marketplace Actions Snippets Notify on Error Commit History (aka Release Notes) Passing Variables Between Steps Publish Package on PyPI Publish Docker Image Check PR Title Extract Task ID from Branch Name Scheduled Events Trigger Workflow Outside of GitHub 📌 Tips Secrets If your repository is in an organization (not a personal repo), always store the secret keys in the organization settings. They are available at the URL: https://github.com/organizations/[ORG_SLUG]/settings/secrets/actions Avoid adding secrets to the repository settings as this will cause them to be duplicated in the future, which will "shoot" at the most inopportune moment (at the time of release). If you add secrets in the organization, it is possible to manage accesses (Repository access –> Selected repositories) and quickly revoke/change if necessary for all repos. Note: You can painlessly move all the secrets from the repositories to the organization level, as their names do not change (but do not forget to remove the secrets from the repository settings). Action options Each action from the marketplace contains an action.yml or action.yaml file at the root of its repository, which may contain directives within it: inputs – input parameters with their description and default values. outputs – names of variables through which action will return result. Strict Error Mode (Shell) When using the run directive in steps – try to use the strict error control setting set -euo pipefail on the first line. If you don't like this approach, at least use shell: bash in this step, since the command shell will be used when you start it: bash --noprofile --norc -eo pipefail {0} If these two directives are missing – the shell will be started without full strict error control (which can lead to unpredictable results in case of problems): shell: /usr/bin/bash -e {0} Note: this applies to Linux distributions. Cache Dependencies Always use caching of dependencies with cache action – this speeds up the execution of the workflow. Look at the usage examples for your package manager. Installing Dependencies in Node.js In the github workflow for projects using Node.js, always prefer install dependencies using command npm ci rather than npm install – it speeds up execution time a lot. Together with dependency caching for large projects, you can achieve amazing acceleration. Be sure to read the documentation about npm ci. Marketplace Actions Try not to use actions that are not versioned and require a @master or @main version to be installed. This is at least unsafe and may cause your workflow to crash, in case of major changes. Many actions are not optimized and run a lot of stuff inside them (especially if they use a docker), which slows do
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We will be the first to admit that it’s often hard to be productive while working from home, especially if no one’s ever really looking over your shoulder. Well, here is one creepy way to feel as though someone is keeping an eye on you, if that’s what gets you to straighten up and fly right. The Eyecam research project by [Marc Teyssier] et. al. is a realistic, motorized eyeball that includes a camera and hangs out on top of your computer monitor. It aims to spark conversation about the sensors that are all around us already in various cold and clinical forms. It’s an open sou
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The chief executives of America’s top 350 companies earned 312 times more than their workers on average last year, according to a new report published Thursday by the Economic Policy Institute.The rise came after the bosses of America’s largest companies got an average pay rise of 17.6% in 2017, taking home an average of $18.9m in compensation while their employees’ wages stalled, rising just 0.3% over the year.The pay gap has risen dramatically, with some fluctuations, since the 1990s. In 1965 the ratio of CEO to worker pay was 20 to one; that figure had risen to 58 to one by in 1989 an
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A CLI kanban board/task manager for Mac and Linux Per project task lists vim style key-bindings Stored using Markdown Clean diffs for easy version control Support for sub-tasks and due dates Trello board imports GitHub project imports Follow @taskellcli on Twitter for updates Contents Installation Using Taskell Options Storage Importing Trello Boards Importing GitHub Projects Configuration Controls Due Dates Theming Roadmap Installation Homebrew (Mac) You can install Taskell on your Mac using Homebrew: Debian/Ubuntu A .deb package is available for Debian/Ubuntu. Download it and install with dpkg -i . You may also need to install the libtinfo5 package (sudo apt install libtinfo5). Fedora Not officially supported, but try running sudo dnf install ncurses-compat-libs then download and run the binary as described below. If that doesn't work you may need to build from scratch (Cabal/Stack). Binaries A binary is available for Mac and Debian/Ubuntu. Download it and copy it to a directory in your $PATH (e.g. /usr/local/bin or /usr/bin). Cabal You can install Taskell with cabal: Make sure you run cabal update if you haven't run it recently. Stack If none of the above options work you can build taskell using Stack. First install Stack on your machine. Then clone the repo and run stack build && stack install: this will build taskell and then install it in ~/.local/bin (so make sure that directory is in your $PATH). Building from scratch can take a long time and occasionally doesn't work the first time (if this happens try running it again). Using Taskell taskell: will use taskell.md in the pwd - offers to create if not found taskell filename.md: will use filename.md in the pwd - offers to create if not found Options -h: show help -v: show version number -t : import a Trello board (see below) -g : import a GitHub project (see below) Tips If you're using a simple two-column "To Do" and "Done" then use the space bar to mark an item as complete while staying in the "To Do" list. If you're using a more complicated column setup then you will want to use H/L to move tasks between columns. Storage By default stores in a taskell.md file in the working directory: ## To Do - Do this ## Done - Do That Importing Trello Boards Taskell includes the ability to fetch a Trello board and store it as local taskell file. Authentication Before fetch
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It’s been two years since our company decided we’ll pick NativeScript to create and maintain our Android App.This was the biggest mistake our rapidly growing company made in the last 4 years. We are about to rebuild our Android app in Flutter from scratch now…Don’t make the same mistake and forget about {NS} before it’s too late:,,You can add NativeScript to an existing Angular Web project with the help of Angular CLI and NativeScript Schematics.”To take advantage of the automated migration commands for NativeScript Angular you will need to install the Angular CLI. Run the following command:npm install --global @angular/cliSource: https://docs.nativescript.org/angular/code-sharing/migrating-a-web-projectDo not believe it. It won’t work just like that. Turning your website to an Android/iOS App will going to be 6 months of struggling with NativeScript.You’ll have to learn how to use their barely working undocumented UI elements and API if you want to create more than a blue button on a white screen. Learning and understanding take months, since the docs are like 60% done, everything else takes days to find out on your own.If you want to work instead of praying for valuable Google results, don’t use NativeScript.They are behind with the docs for years. They always promise that the next version’s documentation will be really finished and will be awesome and contain everything.You wait, reload their website every day, ask them on their Slack channel, where they keep promising. Then they announce that they’ve started working on a new NativeScript version and never finish the current docs. This happened when I was upgrading to 6, then 7, and it’s happening now with version 8 too.Don’t expect that you’ll get proper documentation ever.You should expect instead:Unanswered questions on StackOverflowUnanswered or zero value answers (“it’s your fault…”) on GitHubJudging you on NativeScript Slack community instead of getting proper helpThey promise that you’ll get a real Native App finally, but they don’t mention that it’s going to be extremely slow.There are many GitHub issues opened about how they should improve the performance, but they don’t care at all. Usually, when you are right with a bug report, they don’t answer, just ignore you.Go to their Slack channel and ask them about anything I mention above. They’ll cut you out with some trendy BS like:,,You are too negative, I can’t help”,,We are working on NS for 6 years, how dare you tell something is wrong?”,,You can post a PR if you are that smart”They are very clear about, an Opensource project can’t get a negative review, this is the nature of an Opensource project. I think this thinking led the {NS} devs to the wrong path, they only accept your opinion when you are saying positive things about NativeScript. When you are “negative” (meaning you spot out something is wrong and ask about it), they’ll attack you together and shut you up.We are not perfect. Nobody does. But if everybody is telling me that I’m perfect, I won’t realize how should I improve myself. Right?Quote from one of their community leaders:Negative projections usual
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GTC Nvidia has created a pair of small data-center-friendly GPUs because it doesn’t think customers will get into AI acceleration unless they can use the servers they already operate. The new models – the A10 and A30 – require one and two full-height full-length PCIe slots, respectively. Both employ the Ampere architecture Nvidia uses on its other graphics processors. But both are rather smaller than the company’s other GPUs, and that matters in the context of the recently launched AI Enterprise bundle that Nvidia packages exclusively on VMware’s vSphere. Before VMware got excited about private and hybrid clouds, it was all-in on server consolidation: turning your server fleet into a logical pool of resources instead of tightly coupling servers to specific applications. Manuvir Das, Nvidia’s head of enterprise computing, told The Register that Nvidia has figured out that in practice big, hot GPUs end up in dedicated hardware that more-or-less tightly couples AI to dedicated servers. Das and Nvidia would rather you run AI Enterprise on the hardware you already have and/or the hardware you buy most of – which is 1U and 2U servers. Hence the need for smaller GPUs, both to fit into common servers and in recognition that on-prem data centres are under pressure to be densely packed. Most big server-makers (Dell, Lenovo, H3C, Inspur, QCT and Supermicro) are aboard with the A10 and A30, and Nvidia swears its EGX containerised ML platform will be right at home in this environment. Das said the new GPUs will add $2,000 or $3,000 to the cost of a $12,000 server. Nvidia offered the following specs for the A10: TDP: 150W FP32: 31.2 teraFLOPS BFLOAT16 Tensor Core: 125 teraFLOPS | 250 teraFLOPS* FP16 Tensor Core: 125 teraFLOPS | 250 teraFLOPS* INT8 Tensor Core: 250 TOPS | 500 TOPS* GPU bandwidth: 600GB/s GPU memory: 24GB GDDR6 Here are specs for the A30: TDP: 165W FP32: 10.3 teraFLOPS BFLOAT16 Tensor Core: 165 teraFLOPS | 330 teraFLOPS* FP16 Tensor Core: 165 teraFLOPS | 330 teraFLOPS* INT8 Tensor Core: 330 TOPS | 661 TOPS* GPU bandwidth: 933GB/s GPU memory: 24GB HBM2 (on-die) *With Sparsity Nvidia didn’t say when the A10 and A30 would be available in mass quantities, an important consideration given Nvidia’s wares are often hard to find and against the background of wider silicon supply chain hassles. ® In other GTC news... Today's the start of Nvidia's 2021 GPU Technology Conference, and as such it has a flurry of things to announce besides the A10 and A30. Here's a couple of highlights: Nvidia has designed an Arm-based server-grade processor called Grace, which will use a set of future Arm Neoverse CPU cores. It's aimed at supercomputers and massive AI workloads. It also talked up its BlueField 3 DPU which is designed for so-called smart NICs that accelerate software-defined networking, storage and security functions in hardware away from a machine's host processors.
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After Oracle announced plans to relocate its headquarters from California to Texas, CTO and founder Larry Ellison said he would not be coming along. But he has picked a spot to be a little closer at hand, buying a place in Florida. Yes, if reports are anything to go by, the man of many v-neck sweaters has added to his sizeable property portfolio with the purchase of an $80m Palm Beach mansion overlooking the ocean in the gated Seminole Landing neighbourhood. The mansion – built in the Tuscan style named as being more loathed by architects than even mock-Tudor – was purchased from Gabe Hoffman, founder of Accipiter Capital Management, who reportedly paid just over $17m for it in 2
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Twitter’s mission is to serve the public conversation, and it’s essential, for the world and for Twitter, to increase the number of people who feel comfortable participating in it. To do this, we need to make it easier for everyone to join in and provide more relevant experiences for people across the world. Today, in line with our growth strategy, we’re excited to announce that we are now actively building a team in Ghana. To truly serve the public conversation, we must be more immersed in the rich and vibrant communities that drive the conversations taking place every day across the African continent.  We are looking for specialists to join several teams including product, design,
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An LD_PRELOAD library that disables all forms of writing data safely to disk. fsync() becomes a NO-OP, O_SYNC is removed etc. The idea is to use in testing to get faster test runs where real durability is not required. DO NOT use libeatmydata on software where you care about what it stores. It's called libEAT-MY-DATA for a reason. see http://www.flamingspork.com/projects/libeatmydata Usage eatmydata foo Performance Improvements When running part of the MySQL test suite in 2007 on my laptop: TEST RESULT TIME (ms) TIME (with libeatmydata) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- main.innodb-lock
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Experiments to find Majorana signals are performed by loading a nanowire into a dilution refrigerator capable of cooling it down to close to absolute zero.Credit: HGA Architects and Engineers A shadow has fallen over the race to detect a new type of quantum particle, the Majorana fermion, that could power quantum computers. As someone who works in this area, I’ve become concerned that, after a series of false starts, a significant fraction of the Majorana field is fooling itself. Several key experiments claiming to have detected Majorana particles, initially considered as breakthroughs, have not been confirmed. One recent case
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I miss Froogle — In a few weeks, the Shopping tab on Google.com will be the main interface. GoogleRIP to the Google Shopping app. XDA spotted a hidden closing message in the app on Thursday, and late Friday, Google confirmed to 9to5Google that the Shopping app is on the way out. Here's the company's statement: Within the next few weeks, we’ll no longer be supporting the Shopping app. All of the functionality the app offered users is available on the Shopping tab. We’ll continue building features within the Shopping tab and other Google surfaces, including t
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For as raucous as things can get in the comments section of Hackaday articles, we really love the give and take that happens there. Our readers have an astonishing breadth of backgrounds and experiences, and the fact that everyone so readily shares those experiences and the strongly held opinions that they engender is what makes this community so strong and so useful. But with so many opinions and experiences being shared, it’s sometimes hard to cut through to the essential truth of an issue. This is particularly true where health and safety are at issue, a topic where it’s easy to get bogged down by an accumulation of anecdotes that mask the underlying biology. Case in point: I
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John Moore | Getty ImagesStudents of color have long complained that the facial detection algorithms Proctorio and other exam surveillance companies use fail to recognize their faces, making it difficult if not impossible to take high-stakes tests.Now, a software researcher, who also happens to be a college student at a school that uses Proctorio, says he can prove the Proctorio software is using a facial detection model that fails to recognize Black faces more than 50 percent of the time.“I decided to look into it because [Proctorio has] claimed to have heard of ‘fewer than five’ instances where there were issues with face recognition due to race,” Akash Satheesan, the researcher, told Motherboard. “I knew that from anecdotes to be unlikely … so I set out to find some more conclusive proof and I think I’m fairly certain I did.” Satheesan recently published his findings in a series of blog posts. In them, he describes how he analyzed the code behind Proctorio’s extension for the Chrome web browser and found that the file names associated with the tool’s facial detection function were identical to those published by OpenCV, an open-source computer vision software library.Satheesan demonstrated for Motherboard that the facial detection algorithms embedded in Proctorio’s tool performed identically to the OpenCV models when tested on the same set of faces. Motherboard also consulted a security researcher who validated Satheesan’s findings and was able to recreate his analysis. On its website, Proctorio claims that it uses “proprietary facial detection” technology. It also says that it uses OpenCV products, although not which products or what for. When Motherboard asked the company whether it uses OpenCV’s models for facial recognition, Meredith Shadle, a spokesperson for Proctorio, did not answer directly. Instead, she sent a link to Proctorio’s licenses page, which includes a license for OpenCV.“While the public reports don’t accurately capture how our technology works in full, we appreciate that the analyses confirm that Proctorio uses face detection (rather than facial recognition),” Shadle wrote to Motherboard in an email.
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Kicking off another busy Spring GPU Technology Conference for NVIDIA, this morning the graphics and accelerator designer is announcing that they are going to once again design their own Arm-based CPU. Dubbed Grace – after Grace Hopper, the computer programming pioneer and US Navy rear admiral – the CPU is NVIDIA’s latest stab at more fully vertically integrating their hardware stack by being able to offer a high-performance CPU alongside their regular GPU wares. According to NVIDIA, the chip is being designed specifically for large-scale neural network workloads, and is expected to become available in NVIDIA products in 2023. With two years to go until the chip is ready, NVIDIA is playing things relatively coy at this time. The company is offering only limited details for the chip – it will be based on a future iteration of Arm’s Neoverse cores, for example – as today’s announcement is a bit more focused on NVIDIA’s future workflow model than it is speeds and feeds. If nothing else, the company is making it clear early on that, at least for now, Grace is an internal product for NVIDIA, to be offered as part of their larger server offerings. The company isn’t directly gunning for the Intel Xeon or AMD EPYC server market, but instead they are buildin
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Yuriko Nakao | Getty ImagesGovernments around the world may start to clamp down on the use of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, the CEO of a top crypto exchange has warned.A number of officials — from U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde — have sounded the alarm about the use of bitcoin for money laundering, terrorist financing and other illegal activities."I think there could be some crackdown," Jesse Powell, CEO of Kraken, told CNBC in an interview. Cryptocurrencies have surged in value lately, with bitcoin hitting a record high price of more than $61,000 last month. The world's most valuable digital coin was last trading Monday at around $60,105.Kraken is the world's fourth-largest digital currency exchange in terms of trading volume. The firm is considering going public through a direct listing — similar to Coinbase — next year after achieving record trading volumes in the first quarter, CNBC reported last week.Coinbase is set to go public on Wednesday, and could be valued at as much as $100 billion — more than major trading venue operators like Intercontinental Exchange, owner of the New York Stock Exchange. Crypto investors are hailing the company's stock market debut as a major milestone for the industry after years of skepticism from Wall Street and regulators.Still, Kraken's chief thinks regulatory uncertainty around crypto isn't going away anytime soon. A recent anti-money laundering rule proposed by the U.S. government would require people who hold their crypto in a private digital wallet to undergo identity checks if they make transactions of $3,000 or more."Something like that could really hurt crypto and kind of kill the original use case, which was to just make financial services accessible to everyone," Powell said.Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin have often been associated with illicit activities due to the fact that people transacting with it are pseudonymous — you can see where funds are being sent but not who sent or received them.There are signs that the use of crypto for nefarious purposes may be falling. Illicit activity accounted for just 0.34% of all crypto transaction volum
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NVIDIA introduces GRACE CPUNVIDIA GRACE is a next-generation ARM-based CPU designed for giant-scale AI and HPC applications.Today at GTC 2021 NVIDIA announces its first CPU called GRACE. The CPU is designed for AI and servers, it is not a consumer product.NVIDIA confirmed that GRACE features the highest memory bandwidth of 500 GB/s thanks to LPDDR5X technology with ECC correction. It also attaches to GPU through Cache Coherent NVLINK to GPUs at 900 GB/s. A CPU to CPU connection is up to 600 GB/s.The CPU is based on ARM architecture. It features Neoverse cores, the slide we obtained confirms.“Leading-edge AI and data science are pushing today’s computer architecture beyond its limits—processing unthinkable amounts of data. Using licensed Arm IP, NVIDIA has designed Grace as a CPU specifically for giant-scale AI and HPC. Coupled with the GPU and DPU, Grace gives us the third foundational technology for computing, and the ability to re-architect the data center to advance AI. NVIDIA is now a three-chip company.” — said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIANVIDIA Grace CPU, Source: NVIDIANVIDIA Grace CPU, Source: NVIDIA « press release »NVIDIA Announces CPU for Giant AI and High Performance Computing Workloads‘Grace’ CPU delivers 10x performance leap for systems training giant AI models, using energy-efficient Arm coresSwiss Supercomputing Center and US Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory First to Build NVIDIA CPU-Powered SupercomputersSANTA CLARA, Calif., April 12, 2021 — GTC — NVIDIA today announced its first data center CPU, an Arm-based processor that will deliver 10x the performance of today’s fastest servers on the most complex AI and high performance computing workloads.The result of more than 10,000 engineering years of work, the NVIDIA Grace™ CPU is designed to address the computing requirements for the world’s most advanced applications — including natural language processing, recommender systems and AI supercomputing — that analyze enormous datasets requiring both ultra-fast compute performance and massive memory. It combines energy-efficient Arm CPU cores with an innovative low-power memory subsystem to
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Find out where you fall on the Open-Source Character Alignment Chart Binaries available in releases. If you prefer to install from source, run the following in your command line (requires Go) go get -u github.com/soypat/gitaligned How to use (requires git) Run gitaligned -h for help. Running gitaligned in this repo: gitaligned -u soypat Output: Author soypat is Neutral Good Commits: 6 Accumulated:{-0.2 2} Planned Output: Steve -- Chaotic Neutral (89.9% confidence) 82 commits 99 % Lean towards Chaotic 10 % Lean towards Good How it works (sort of) For now gitaligned does some basic natural language processing using prose and has some ad-hoc rules based on typical git commit message mannerisms. Opinions of commit messages and their alignment Commit Message Alignm
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Easy to UseIntuitive and user-friendly. PMS has been designed to be clear and handy so that everything is organized and divided into the proper categories and subsections.Freedom of mindPMS allows to keep control of schedules, notes, contacts, to-do lists and even manage documentations and images. Say goodbye to sticky notes and endless search for lost document.Powered by Symfony and TypscriptThe core of the project relies on the Symfony and Typescript which makes it easier to maintain, extend and optimize.DashboardContacts managementPayments chartsIssues tracking1 of 4Personal Management System (PMS) is a web-app tool designed to organize the essentials of everyday life, everything from a simple to-do list and notes to file organizers. No more thinking about unhandled pending issues, no m
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British AI-powered infosec biz Darktrace is to go public in England's capital city, the company told the London Stock Exchange this morning. Sky News reported last night that chief exec Poppy Gustafsson is expected to make around £20m from the initial public offering, with shares trading on Darktrace expected to open “at around the end of this month.” A filing lodged with the London Stock Exchange and published on its website stated that Darktrace’s revenues were $199.1m in fiscal year 2020 with a claimed compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 58.3 per cent between 2018 and 2020. “The majority of senior management has been with Darktrace since inception, including its Chief Executive Officer, Poppy Gustafsson OBE” boasted the filing as it quoted the chief exec saying: “Developed by our talented software engineering teams in Cambridge, our artificial intelligence was the first on the market to be deployed at-scale in the enterprise, and today is responsible for protecting over 4,700 organizations worldwide from the most sophisticated cyber-threats.” The statement made no mention at all of the fact that Darktrace was heavily backed by Mike Lynch, form
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Join us on Wednesday, April 14 at noon Pacific for the Inside Smart Meters Hack Chat with [Hash]! That electrical meter on the side of your house might not look like it, but it’s pretty packed with technology. What was once a simple electromechanical device that a human would have to read in person is now a node on a far-flung network. Not only does your meter total up the amount of electricity you use, but it also talks to other meters in the neighborhood, sending data skipping across town to routers that you might never have noticed as it makes its way back to the utility. And the smartest of smart meters not only know how much electricity you’re using, but they can also tease information about which appliances are being used simply by monitoring patterns of usage. While all this sounds great for utility companies, what does it mean for the customers? What are the implications of having a network of smart meters all talking to each other wirelessly? Are these devices vulnerable to attack? Have they been engineered to be as difficult to exploit as something should be when it’s designed to be in service for 15 years or more? These questions and more burn within [Hash], a hardware hacker and security researcher who runs the RECESSIM reverse-engineering wiki. He’s been inside a smart meter or two and has shared a lot of what he has learned on the wiki and with some in-depth YouTube videos. He’ll stop by the Hack Chat to discuss what he’s learned about the internals of smart meters, how they work, and where they may be vulnerable to attack. Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’
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April 2021Every year since 1982, Forbes magazine has published a list of the richest Americans. If we compare the 100 richest people in 1982 to the 100 richest in 2020, we notice some big differences.In 1982 the most common source of wealth was inheritance. Of the 100 richest people, 60 inherited from an ancestor. There were 10 du Pont heirs alone. By 2020 the number of heirs had been cut in half, accounting for only 27 of the biggest 100 fortunes.Why would the percentage of heirs decrease? Not because inheritance taxes increased. In fact, they decreased significantly during this period. The reason the percentage of heirs has decreased is not that fewer people are inheriting great fortunes, but that more people are making them.How are people making these new fortunes? Roughly 3/4 by starting companies and 1/4 by investing. Of the 73 new fortunes in 2020, 56 derive from founders' or early employees' equity (52 founders, 2 early employees, and 2 wives of founders), and 17 from managing investment funds.There were no fund managers among the 100 richest Americans in 1982. Hedge funds and private equity firms existed in 1982, but none of their founders were rich enough yet to make it into the top 100. Two things changed: fund managers discovered new ways to generate high returns, and more investors were willing to trust them with their money. [1]But the main source of new fortunes now is starting companies, and when you look at the data, you see big changes there too. People get r
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Wikidata, SPARQL, and RDF in general. And I guess semi-relatedly things like Prolog? I recently decided to fiddle with Wikidata, and it is fascinating to be able to query for any part of a statement, not just the value!In SPARQL you write statements in the form But the cool part is that any of those three parts can be extracted, so you can ask things like "what are the cities in ", or "what country harbors the city ", but most importantly, "how does relate to ".For example, if you wanted to find out all the historica
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Today, we are introducing the OpenSearch project, a community-driven, open source fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana. We are making a long-term investment in OpenSearch to ensure users continue to have a secure, high-quality, fully open source search and analytics suite with a rich roadmap of new and innovative functionality. This project includes OpenSearch (derived from Elasticsearch 7.10.2) and OpenSearch Dashboards (derived from Kibana 7.10.2). Additionally, the OpenSearch project is the new home for our previous distribution of Elasticsearch
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Arihant Verma is a Software Engineer based in India. He likes to read open source code and help others understand it. He’s a rich text editors fanatic. His … More about Arihant ↬In this article, we’ll look at how to create an outside focus and click handler with React. You’ll learn how to recreate an open-source React component (react-foco) from scratch in doing so. To get the most out of this article, you’ll need a basic understanding of JavaScript classes, DOM event delegation and React. By the end of the article, you’ll know how you can use JavaScript class instance propertie
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Those taking a shot each time Huawei uttered the phrase "US sanctions" during the opening of it's 2021 Global Analyst Summit would have been sozzled as the company laid a host of ills at the doorstep of Uncle Sam's "entity list". Eric Xu, Huawei's rotating chairman, said this morning he did not hold out much hope that things might change under the Biden administration and warned delegates that he expects the company to remain sat on the naughty step "for a very long time." Xu also blamed US sanctions for the current chip shortage. "Because of the sanctions, we are seeing panic-stockpiling by Chinese companies," he said, telling attendees Huawei estimates that anywhere from three to six months' worth of supply had been snapped up by firms fearful of suffering the same fate as Huawei
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Photo: Loic Venance (Getty Images)When we talk about Facebook’s myriad foibles and fuckups, we’re usually laying the blame on things that happen within the Big Blue App, or, increasingly, the social network’s CEO. What’s less discussed are the company’s ties to the potentially millions of sites and services using its software—but now, thankfully, we can get a window into that for ourselves. But don’t get too excited.In a blog post earlier today, the famously privacy-conscious Mark Zuckerberg announced—in honor of Data Privacy Day, which is apparently a thing—the official rollout of a long-awaited Off-Facebook Activity tool that allows Facebook users to monitor and manage the connections between Facebook profiles and their off-platform activity.“To help shed more light
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April 12, 2021 4 minute read This is an excerpt from my upcoming corporate open source strategy book, being published by Pragmatic Bookshelf in 2021. All book excerpt content is early in the development process and therefore unedited; the errors are mine alone (and will be fixed before publishing 😉). Intellectual property (IP) concepts play a huge role in software in general and free and open source software in particular. IP is a complex and nuanced body of law, but thankfully you don’t need to pass the bar to understand the fundamental concepts, starting with copyright and its relation to software. As you’ve probably already gu
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https://encore.dev Encore is a Go backend framework for rapidly creating APIs and distributed systems. It uses static analysis and code generation to reduce the boilerplate you have to write, resulting in an extremely productive developer experience. The key features of Encore are: No boilerplate: Encore drastically reduces the boilerplate needed to set up a production ready backend application. Define backend services, API endpoints, and call APIs with a single line of Go code. Distributed Tracing: Encore uses a combination of static analysis and code generation to automatically instrument your application for excellent observability. Automatically captures information about API calls, goroutines, HTTP requests, database queries, and more. Automatically works for local
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— Published on Apr 12, 2021 10:25 AM The voting members of the Free Software Foundation, which include the board of directors, voted to appoint Richard Stallman to a board seat after several months of thorough discussion and thoughtful deliberation. We decided to bring RMS back because we missed his wisdom. His historical, legal and technical acumen on free software is unrivaled. He has a deep sensitivity to the ways that technologies can contribute to both the enhancement and the diminution of basic human rights. His global network of connections is invaluable. He remains the most articulate philosopher and an unquestionably dedicated advocat
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This may come as a bit of a shocker, but technically speaking, not all water on Earth is made up of H2O molecules.Less than a century ago, the discovery of the hydrogen isotope deuterium – 2H, but often simplified to D – revealed the existence of another kind of water with the chemical formula 2H2O or simply D2O. Here's how they differ. A typical hydrogen atom contains one proton within its nucleus. The deuterium isotope, however, has a neutron in addition to the proton, giving the hydrogen atom a greater mass. Hence, water formed with this type of heavy hydrogen is usually called... heavy water.Aside from that one key difference between H2O and D2O – which gives heavy water about 10 percent greater density than regular water – these two water types are chemically the same,
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— Published on Apr 12, 2021 10:24 AM Ever since my teenage years, I felt as if there were a filmy curtain separating me from other people my age. I understood the words of their conversations, but I could not grasp why they said what they did. Much later I realized that I didn't understand the subtle cues that other people were responding to. Later in life, I discovered that some people had negative reactions to my behavior, which I did not even know about. Tending to be direct and honest with my thoughts, I sometimes made others uncomfortable or even offended them -- especially women. This was not a choice: I didn't understand the problem eno
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In the latest A/B test, Microsoft is using Windows 10’s taskbar to push Chromium Edge-powered web apps for YouTube, Facebook, Office, and more. The new Edge popup from Microsoft will appear after applying general Windows Updates, or when you’re normally browsing other apps. If you’ve Windows 10 October 2020 Update or newer, and whether or not you have the Edge browser icon on your taskbar, you may soon start seeing a new pop-up that encourages you to try the Edge-powered web apps. “Go straight to top sites”, the pop-up notification reads, with Microsoft explaining that it will “pin your favourite sites to quickly open tabs directly from the taskbar”. The feature is apparently based on Microsoft Edge’s taskbar pinning wizard, which was introduce
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As those of us with an interest in space exploration look forward with excitement towards new Lunar and Martian exploration, it’s worth casting our minds back for a moment because today marks a special anniversary. Sixty years ago on April 12th 1961, the Vostok 1 craft with its pilot Yuri Gagarin was launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in what is now Kazakhstan. During the 108-minute mission he successfully completed an orbit of the Earth before parachuting from his craft after re-entry and landing on a farm near Engels, in the Saratov oblast to the south of Moscow. Yuri Gagarin In doing so he became the first human in space as well as the first to orbit the Earth, he became a hero to the Soviet and Russian people as well as the rest of the world, and scored a major
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слава! — "Looking at the Earth from afar, you realize it is too small for conflict." The first photo of Yuri Gagarin after his historic spaceflight. Russian Government Soviet space chief Sergey Korolev giv
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Logowatch It has been a busy couple of months for creatives toiling away in IBM's strategy boutique but the team has conjured marketing magic with a scintillating new brand name that will head up the breakaway Global Technology Services unit. Kyndryl. Whisper it again. Kyndryl. It will be synonymous with quality tech infrastructure services, Big Blue promises. GTS will be spun out into a newly traded public entity in 2021 that until today's daring rebrand was simply known as New Co. "Kyndryl evokes the spirit of true partnership and growth," said Martin Schroeter, CEO at Kyndryl, which is definitely not a rural family dental practice with a sense of humour. "Customers around the world will come to know Kyndryl as a brand that runs the vital systems at the heart of progress, as an i
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🛩 ⛔️ 🚝 👍 — France has a well-developed train network, and the ban only affects five routes. Enlarge / A Train Grand Vitesse.Michael Dunning/Getty Images On Sunday, the French National Assembly voted to ban some short-haul flights in favor of train travel. If the measure is formally approved, it would mean the end to domestic flights on routes where the journey could also be completed by train in 2.5 hours or less. It's the kind of news that will have some cheering in delight as one of the world's richest nations makes a strong statement about the need to cut carbon emissions. However, there will probably be less impact than y
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by Marko | November 23, 2020 Using console.log() for JavaScript debugging is the most common practice among developers. But, there is more… The console object provides access to the browser’s debugging console. The specifics of how it works vary from browser to browser, but there is a de facto set of features that are typically provided. * The most common Console methods: console.log() – For general output of logging information. console.info() – Informative logging of information. console.debug() – Outputs a message to the console with the log level debug. console.warn() – Outputs a warning message. console.error() – Outputs an error message. * Custom CSS styles for a console.log() The console.log output can be styled in DevTools using the CSS format specifier. * String substitutions When passing a string to one of the console object’s methods that accept a string (such as log()), you may use these substitution strings: %s – string %i or %d – integer %o or %O – object %f – float * console.assert() Log a message and stack trace to console if the first argument is false. * console.clear() Clear the console. * console.count() Log the number of times this line has been called with the given label.
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In July 2014 Taylor Swift wrote an editorial in the Wall Street Journal entitled, For Taylor Swift, the Future of Music Is a Love Story: There are many (many) people who predict the downfall of music sales and the irrelevancy of the album as an economic entity. I am not one of them. In my opinion, the value of an album is, and will continue to be, based on the amount of heart and soul an artist has bled into a body of work, and the financial value that artists (and their labels) place on their music when it goes out into the marketplace. In recent years, you’ve probably read the articles about major recording artists who have decided to practically give their music away, for this promotion or that exclusive deal. My hope for the future, not just in the music industry, but in every young girl I meet is that they all realize their worth and ask for it. The Internet commentariat was unimpressed; Nilay Patel wrote in Vox: Taylor makes a nice little argument in favor of paying for music. “Music is art,” she says, “and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. It’s my opinion that music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album’s price point is.” This is an impressively-constructed syllogism. It is also deeply, deeply wrong…On the internet, there’s no scarcity: there’s an endless amount of everything available to everyone. The laws of supply and demand don’t work terribly well when there’s infinite supply. Swift is right that “important, rare things are valuable,” but she’s failed to understand that
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Now for something completely different. In the spiritual vein of One Night in Rio: Vacation photos from Plan9 and AWK for multimedia, here is a tool that is the link that ties almost all the projects within the Arcan umbrella together into one – and one we have been building towards for a depressing number of years and tens of thousands of hours. Pipeworld (github link) combines ‘dataflow‘ programming (like Excel or Userland) with a Zooming-Tiling User Interface (ZUI). It builds dynamic pipelines similarly to (Ultimate Plumber), and leverages most of the gamut of Arcan features — from terminal emulator liberated CLIs and TUIs to dynamic network transparency. It follows many of the principles for a Diverging Desktop Future, particularly towards the idea of making clients simpler and more composable by focusing on interactive “breadboarding” data exchange. There is a whole lot of ground to cover, so let’s get started. The following is a video (youtube) that joins all the clips in this article together, but you will likely understand more of what is going on by reading through the sections. Shortlinks to the individual sections are as follows: Zoomable UIDataflow ComputingTerminal, CLI and PipelinesAdvanced Networking, Sharing and DebuggingTrajectory and Future Zoomable (Tiling) UI The core is based around ‘cells’ of various types. These naturally tile in two dimensions as rows and columns. The first cell on each row determines the default behaviour of the row, and moving selection around will ‘pan’ the view to fit the current cell. Each row has a scale factor, and the same goes for the cell. This means that different sets of cells can have different sizes (‘heterogenous zooming’) with different post-processing based on magnification and so on. Some cells can switch contents based on magnification, while others stay blissfully ignorant. In the following short clip you see some of this in play, using a combination of keybindings as well as mouse gestures. This might make some feel a bit nauseous as this is not something that generalises well to groups of observers (we have solutions for that too) —
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Customers are at the heart of every business. There is nothing more frustrating for the average customer than having to navigate some company’s automated support and messaging system. When each process “has to be” funneled through an AI empowered chatbot, to customer service representatives, all while distinctly feeling herded and managed, it increases levels of frustration for users. Remember, customers are forced to communicate this way. When phone numbers are intentionally obfuscated, and companies are increasingly relying on chatbot systems to interact, the customer loses their feeling of power and ability to accomplish their goals. They’re lost. There’s no question of the efficacy of chatbots to handle the majority of transactional communications. There is clear evidence that using chatbots and automation has benefits to an organization, especially now that we’re increasingly decentralized. It lowers labor costs and increases the ability to control messaging into CRM funnels, standardizing the experience and providing services at scale. Companies will save 2.5 billion customer service hours using chatbots by the end of 2022.[i] That’s a lot of savings that add to the bottom line. But are we sacrificing cost savings for future sales? The cost savings
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[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index] From: Eli Zaretskii Subject: Getting ready to land native-compilation on master Date: Fri, 09 Apr 2021 17:02:15 +0300 AFAICT, we are quite ready to land this important feature. The branch was tested on several systems and is in good shape: many issues and bugs were fixed, and currently no known issues remain that block the merge. (There's a lot yet to do wrt documenting the feature and its various aspects, but that can be done on master after merging.) If some of you have some unusual or rare or exotic system or Emacs configuration, and did not yet try building the native-comp branch, this is your chance to have a go before the merge: please build the branch and report any issues or problems you bump into. If no significant issues pop up within a week, I will ask Andrea to merge the branch onto master the next weekend (i.e. around 17th of April). Last, but not least: I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Andrea for his hard work and perseverance during this last year. We would not be where we are now with this feature without his devotion and determination to see this through. Thanks a lot! Getting ready to land native-compilation on master, Eli Zaretskii <= Re: Getting ready to land native-compilation on master, tomas, 2021/04/09 Re: Getting ready to land native-compilation on master, Stefan Kangas, 2021/04/09 Re: Getting ready to land native-compilation on master, T.V Raman, 2021/04/09 Re: Getting ready to land native-compilation on master, Pip Cet, 2021/04/09 Re: Getting ready to land native-compilation on master, Thierry Volpiatto, 2021/04/09 Re: Getting ready to land native-compilation on master, Eli Zaretskii, 2021/04/09 Re: Getting ready to land native-compilation on master, Thierry Volpiatto, 2021/04/10 Re: Getting ready to land native-compilation on master, Jens C . Jensen, 2021/04/09 Re: Getting ready to land native-compilation on master, Stefan Monnier, 2021/04/09 Re: Getting ready to land native-compilation on master, Jens C . Jensen, 2021/04/09 Prev by Date: Re: Simple isearch
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We’re accustomed to seeing giant LED-powered screens in sports venues and outdoor displays. What would it take to bring this same technology into your living room? Very, very tiny LEDs. MicroLEDs. MicroLED screens have been rumored to be around the corner for almost a decade now, which means that the time is almost right for them to actually become a reality. And certainly display technology has come a long way from the early cathode-ray tube (CRT) technology that powered the television and the home computer revolution. In the late 1990s, liquid-crystal display (LCD) technology became a feasible replacement for CRTs, offering a thin, distortion-free image with pixel-perfect image reproduction. LCDs also allowed for displays to be put in many new places, in addition to finally having that wall-mounted television. Since that time, LCD’s flaws have become a sticking point compared to CRTs. The nice features of CRTs such as very fast response time, deep blacks and zero color shift, no matter the angle, have led to a wide variety of LCD technologies to recapture some of those features. Plasma displays seemed promising for big screens for a while, but organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) have taken over and still-in-development technologies like SED and FED off the table. While OLED is very good in terms of image quality, its flaws including burn-in and uneven wear of the different organic dyes responsible for the colors. MicroLEDs hope to capitalize on OLED’s weaknesses by bringing brighter screens with no burn-in using inorganic LED technology, just very, very small. So what does it take to scale a standard semiconductor LED down to the size of a pixel, and when can one expect to buy MicroLED displays? Let’s take a look. All About the Photons Schematic view of a color CRT: three electron guns along with the deflection coils to target the electrons onto the phosphor layer. The most important property of a display is of course the ability to generate a sufficient number of photons to create a clear image. In the case of CRTs, this is done by accelerating electrons and smashing them into a phosphor layer. Each impact results in a change in the energy
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No plug-ins, zero configuration. All the essentials included by default.File FinderQuickly indexes and finds files using a simple, accurate matching algorithm. Ignores git directories by default; easily configurable to your own liking, if you must.Easy MovementFast, precise cursor movement without repetitive keystrokes or fancy expressions. Look where you'd like to move, and type the token. That's it.Symbol JumpMove to any class, struct, or method definition within the current buffer. Easily augment the default set of supported languages using the .sublime-syntax format.Flexible KeymapsSimple
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The FreeBSD project will offer "Tier 1" support to 64-bit ARM processors in FreeBSD 13.0, expected to be released shortly. The only other Tier 1 platform is AMD64. FreeBSD defines four tiers of platform support, with only Tier 1 fully supported for production use. Tier 1 architectures have official release images and full documentation. There is also a commitment that changes to the main tree of source code must not "knowingly break the build of a Tier 1 platform." Tier 2 platforms are for developmental and niche architectures, or those reaching end of life. In FreeBSD 13, 32-bit x86 h
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The Zig project has a non-profit foundation that needs to be managed, a community to shape, and the actual language to develop. These are all big, complex problems that don’t default to a positive outcome without active care. Andrew did an amazing job laying the foundations, from deliberately choosing a non-profit corporate model, to picking clear values based on respect and empathy for the community to crystallize around, and finally by leading development by example both when it comes to exploring new ideas and when doing the methodical part of the work required to go from a proof of concept to a reliable tool, like zig cc, for example. This is already a huge amount of good work that has been done and I’m happy to have been contributing to it for almost a year by now, but I know that this is still not enough and, as the project grows, we’ll have new, harder puzzles to solve. One increasingly relevant puzzle is how to exist in the extended cinematic universe of open source development, where the influence of big players can have devastating effects on smaller projects. The importance of this last point cannot be overstated because, of all the various playing fields, this is the one where players enact meticulously planned adversarial strategies that can undo any kind of good work if you’re not attentive enough. In the post where I announced joining the Zig Software Foundation I mentioned the importance of acknowledging how growing a successful project is not an entirely peaceful process, and now I want to talk about how recent experiences have further developed my understanding of the open source game, and how that relates to the future of Zig. The end of Redis As a very funny coincidence, my last day at Redis Labs was also the same day Antirez resigned from the open source project and handed over both the official repository on GitHub and the main website (redis.io) to the company. Redis Labs has always been frenemies with the cloud vendors, and especially AWS. The reason is simple: Redis Labs and all the companies that have formed behind OSS databases have to accept AWS as a partner, but they also want to be the primary beneficiary of the value that their respective OSS projects generate, while AWS begs to disagree. This is a battle where neither party is the “good guy” and the discussion that ensues reduces open source to a set of legal con
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This article is part of the Technology Insight series, made possible with funding from Intel. As we create more content, deploy more sensors at the network’s edge, and replicate more data for AI to contextualize, the demand for compute bandwidth roughly doubles every three years. Keeping up is becoming increasingly difficult as modern computing architectures get closer and closer to the theoretical performance limits of electrical connections linking their processors, storage, and networking components. Silicon photonics technology—a combination of silicon integrated circuits and semiconductor lasers—may help  overcome the bottlenecks imposed by electrical I/O, replacing copper connections with optical ones at the board and package level. According to James Jaussi, senior principal engineer and director of Intel’s PHY research lab, miniaturized silicon photonics components open the door to architectures that are more disaggregated. That could look like pools of compute, memory, and peripheral functionality distributed throughout the system; connected over long distances with optical links, software-defined infrastructure, and high-speed networking. For now, integrated photonics is still the stuff of lab experiments. But a number of breakthroughs introduced during Intel’s recent Labs Day show that the technology is capable of lower power, higher performance, and greater reach than today’s server interconnects. KEY POINTS: Silicon photonics technology is already bringing down costs and improving availability of high-speed optical transceivers. The miniaturization of silicon photonics components opens the door to board-to-board and package-to-package opti
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Loading... In December, we announced the beta of Cloudflare Pages: a fast, secure, and free way for frontend developers to build, host, and collaborate on Jamstack sites.It’s been incredible to see what happens when you put a powerful tool in developers’ hands. In just a few months of beta, thousands of developers have deployed over ten thousand projects, reaching millions of people around the world.Today, we’re excited to announce that Cloudflare Pages is now available for anyone and ready for your production needs. We’re also excited to show off some of the new features we’ve been working on over the course of the beta, including: web analytics, built in redirects, protected previews, live previews, and optimized images (oh, my!). Lastly, we’ll give you a sneak peek into what we'll be working on next to make Cloudflare Pages your go-to platform for deploying not just static sites, but full-stack applications.What is Cloudflare Pages?Cloudflare Pages radically simplifies the process of developing and deploying sites by taking care of all the tedious parts of web development. Now, developers can focus on the fun and creative parts instead.Seamless builds for developersGetting started with Cloudflare Pages is as easy as connecting your repository and selecting your framework and
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In Brief A year-long investigation into Clearview, the dodgy facial recognition startup, has revealed how its software has been used by over 1,800 public agencies in an attempt to identify over 7,000 people from 2018 to 2020. The data collected by BuzzFeed News showed just how haphazardly the machine learning software was used. In an attempt to win customer contracts, Clearview gave out free trials to public agencies, including law enforcement and even places, like the Department of Fish and Wildlife in Washington and Minnesota’s Commerce Fraud Bureau. Employees could apparently use the technology on whomever they wanted, whether they were trying to identify a suspect in a criminal case or students at universities. In one case that was particularly disturbing, police officers in Alameda, California continued to use Clearview's tools although the local City Council voted to ban the use of public facial recognition tools in 2019. AI algorithms aren’t perfect, and particularly struggle with correctly identifying women and people of colour. The data has been compiled into a handy searchable database. Google AI Research manager resigns after org is reshuffled The manager that oversaw Google’s AI ethics unit, which has seen two researchers pushed out, has resigned. Samy Bengio, a well-known name in the academic world of machine learning, has become the most senior member of the Chocolate Factory to leave after it controversially ousted Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell. Although Bengio did not explicitly say why he decided to leave in an email to his colleagues, he hinted at the recent fiasco, where Google fired its Ethical AI team co-leads over a paper that was critical about massive language models. “I learned so much with all of you, in terms of machine learning research of course, but also on how difficult yet important it is to organize a large team of researchers so as to promote long term ambitious research, exploration, rigor, diversity and inclusion,” he wrote, according to Bloomberg. Google has since reshuffled the management of its AI research teams. Intel’s AI chips are going into a new academic supercomputer Chipzilla's own-brand machine learning chips will be used to build Voyager, a new supercomputer for the University of California, San Diego, and it's expected to be up and running later this year. Intel has been trying to give Nvidia a run for its money by developing its own training and inference chips to challenge the GPU. But it fell woefully behind and abandoned previous attempts led by Nervana, a startup it acquired in 2016. It later snapped up Habana, another AI hardware startup in 2019, and it was out with the old and in with the new. Now, it appears some of Intel’s or, rather, Habana’s hard work is paying off. “The Voyager supercomputer will use Habana’s unique interconnectivity technology to efficiently scale AI capacity with 336 Gaudi processors for training and 16 Habana Goya processors for AI inference,” the company said in a statement. It’s difficult to work out just how good these chips really are, however, an Intel representative declined to comment on the performan
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INTENDED AUDIENCE: Raspberry Pi hobbyists. Software developers with no embedded systems experience. READ TIME: About 10 minutes, excluding exercises. GOAL: The instructions below will explain how to build a Linux environment for a Raspberry Pi 3B from scratch, focusing on extreme minimalism. I will build most components from source code and use BusyBox as the only user application on the target. The focus is on minimalism for the sake of learning. Optimizations like network boot, secondary bootloaders, compressed filesystems, etc.. will not be covered. Hardware Requirements Partition the SD Card Download Firmware Blobs Create A Toolchain on Host Machine Build the Kernel Copy Kernel and DTBs to Root Partition Configure Kernel and Bootloader Create Local Directory for Root Filesystem Install Kernel Modules Download BusyBox Configure BusyBox Build BusyBox Root Filesystem, Part II Power On and Explore the Shell Prompt Next Steps Key Terms BOOT LOADER: A platform specific program that runs before the operating system is loaded. It is responsible for hardware initialization and loading of the OS kernel into memory. BOOT PARTITION: A disk partition that is used by the bootloader. BUSYBOX: A single Linux application that emulates many common system utilities, such as cp, ls, mv, etc.. Often used in embedded systems. DEFAULT KERNEL CONFIGURATION: A set of default options that are applied to the Linux kernel when it is compiled from source code by a developer. DEVICE TREE BLOBS: A binary format used to describe a machine’s device layout. This information is used by the Linux kernel (and its device drivers) to support platform-specific hardware. DEVICE TREE OVERLAY: Fragments of a device tree that modify the DEVICE TREE BLOB. They are typically used to make small changes or additions to a DEVICE TREE BLOB. HOST MACHINE: In embedded systems, the HOST MACHINE is a computer used for software development that is not the end product of the software development activity. KERNEL MODULES: Code that can be loaded and unloaded from the kernel at runtime. They add functionality to the kernel (often for hardware management) without the need to reboot the system or modify the kernel itself. LINUX KERNEL: Responsible for managing system hardware and resources as well as providing services to userspace applications. Loaded by the BOOT LOADER at system start. INIT: The first program loaded at start time by the Linux kernel. LINUX KERNEL COMMAND LINE: A set of options that are passed to the Linux kernel when it is loaded. It often contains information about how to load the root filesystem. ROOT FILESYSTEM: A series of directories that contain essential applications (like init and a shell) as well as system configuration. TARGET MACHINE: The embedded device that is the final product of embedded systems development. See also: HOST MACHINE. USB TTL CABLE: A cable that allows you to access the Raspberry Pi’s system shell without needing to attach a keyboard and monitor. It is required hardware for this tutorial. They are very inexpensive. You will need: A micro SD Card larger than 2 Gigabytes A micro SD Card reader A Raspberry Pi 3
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Microsoft announced Monday it would buy Nuance Communications, a software company that focuses on speech recognition through artificial intelligence, in an all-cash transaction valued at $19.7 billion (including debt assumption).Why it matters: This is Microsoft's second-largest acquisition, behind the $26.2 billion deal for LinkedIn in 2016.Microsoft is trying to leapfrog competitors like Google and Amazon as they face record antitrust scrutiny.Its cloud business has also been booming during the pandemic. Microsoft's stock hit an all-time high on Friday, as it approaches $2 trillion in market value. Details: Nuance makes money by selling software tools that help to transcribe speech. The Bu
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The results are in for an IBM initiative launched last June to find and replace internal outdated and biased IT terminology. A GitHub post from Dale Davis Jones, vice president and Distinguished Engineer at IBM Global Technical Services, reveals which terms will be switched out. The changed terms include: old term new term Chinese wall firewall or ethical wall man hour / man day person hour / person day segregation separation or segmentation white hat hacker offensive security researcher black hat hacker attacker master (when paired with slave) controller, leader, manager, main, coordinator, parent or primary slave worker, child, helper, replica, follower or
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In case you hadn't noticed, Prince Philip, aka the Duke of Edinburgh, aka the Queen's hubby, aka Stavros, shuffled off this mortal coil on Friday and thus the UK entered a period of "national mourning". Far from citizens taking to the streets and screaming at the sky, fists balled in anguish, most folk are pretty chill about the passing of the nation's slightly inappropriate grandad, who missed hitting a century by about two months. This collective "mourning" was nowhere more keenly felt than on nationalrail.co.uk, whose overlords deemed it necessary to render the train booking website in greyscale as a tribute to Phil. There's your sort-of-IT angle. But far from the maudl
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As you may notice, this is almost a part 2 of my Secure your boot process: UEFI + Secureboot + EFISTUB + Luks2 + lvm + ArchLinux. Except that here i’ll not talk about all the secureboot stuff that i’ve already ran into on my last blogpost. This one is specifically focused on how to achieve the same setup using Fedora. This blogpost compiles my personal opinions around using bootloaders on EFI environments so, the classic “opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer” applies. Fedora manual installation process. Luks2+lvm setup for encrypted partitions at boot time. /home disk setup with some dracut tweaks. EFISTUB to make L
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“I constantly ask myself, Do I deserve this money?” Animation: QuickHoney Since July 2020, nearly 750 companies have gone public, raising more than $200 billion and minting thousands of new paper millionaires. Amid the frenzy, one millennial tech worker on the verge of unexpected wealth shared what was going through her mind. When I joined my company, I theoretically knew there were only two exit p
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Press play to listen to this article An effort to turn "ecocide" — the systematic destruction of the environment — into an international crime on par with genocide and crimes against humanity is gaining momentum in the EU. Buried deep in an obscure European Parliament report is a sentence calling for the EU to explore the idea. The provision was backed by most of the legislature's political groupings in committee in March, which means it's likely to be adopted by the full Parliament later this month. That puts the EU way out in front of most other jurisdictions in an international bid to make ecocide a crime prosecuted by the International Criminal Co
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Who, Me? We return to the Cold War in today's Who, Me? Start your week with suspected sabotage, computer sleuthery, and a satisfying slug of Grand Marnier deep in the heart of 1970s Москва. It was 1978 and our reader was working for a firm that had just sold a computer to the company that manufactured the Moskvitch. Sadly now defunct, the Moskvitch was the must-have car of the time for citizens of the Soviet Union (officially, at least). Despite being the butt of a thousand jokes, demand for the vehicle outstripped supply and people found themselves with a substantial wait before they could get their hands on the rear-wheel-drive engineering marvel. Our reader, who was initially Regomised as "Boris", but whom we've opted to call "Ivan Ivanovich" was sent to the site to investigate multiple mysterious system crashes. A bit of background: a bespoke application known as "the 'Quality Control' system" ran on this computer. "It was actually a messaging system," Ivan explained, "whereby inspectors at the end of the line could send messages to assembly stations, such as 'rear door installed upside down.' I know it seems laughable now, but at that time, this was big business." However, there were problems. The system crashed at least once per shift, causing delays in production. "An enterprising salesman took advantage of the problem to sell them more memory, and the fault reduced to once a day (they worked two shifts a day)," said Ivan. A bit better, but still not right. The company's top communications experts looked into the problem, but came up empty. And so it was that Ivan who, by his own admission, "knew nothing about comms" was sent to Moscow on a year's contract as Project Manager and given a simple brief: "Just stop the bloody dumps!" At the plant, Ivan shared an office with 13 other programmers and a VDU, which had been negotiated as part of the contract. His job title also scored him his own car and a diplomatic apartment. Not really knowing where to start, he fired up the newfangled screen and watched the internals of the computer doing its stuff. A floppy filled with software worth thousands of francs: Techie can't take it, customs won't keep it. What to do? READ MORE "I had imagined a dynamic environment," he said, "with messages flying hither and yon as the treasured vehicles issued forth from the track..." He did not see that. What he actually saw was a queue of messages sent to one assembly station. A queue that got bigger and bigger until the memory filled up and the computer crashed. "A little delving," he told us, "showed that the fancy Italian teletype terminals (3-case: upper, lower, Cyrillic) were put into 'send' mode when any key was pressed, and could only return to 'receive' mode when 'send' was pressed. "Someone on the track had learned how to silence the poxy terminal – just press a key!" The bespoke software had no way of knowing what had befallen the terminal and so just kept on sending messages until the computer fell over. The fix was trivial. Ivan told us it was a mere 13-line patch that added a 255-second timeout on the input. What was not trivial was how to test his work. "After much nego
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A comprehensive list of various text to diagram tools. Markdeep https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/ markdown, ascii-to-all Svgbob https://ivanceras.github.io/svgbob-editor/ ascii-to-all Archetype https://fatiherikli.github.io/archetype/ ascii-drawing Textik https://textik.com/ ascii-drawing ASCIIFlow http://asciiflow.com/ ascii-drawing Pikchr https://pikchr.org/home/pikchrshow all Kroki https://kroki.io/ BlockDiag, SeqDiag, ActDiag, NwDiag, PacketDiag, RackDiag, BPMN, Bytefield, PlantUML, Ditaa, Erd, Excalidraw, GraphViz, Mermaid, Nomnoml, PlantUML, SvgBob, UMLet, Vega, Vega-Lite
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how the other 0.001% lives — Whether you're driving or a passenger, there's no escaping the sense of occasion. And the award for most improved goes to.... the 2021 Rolls-Royce Ghost, which is better than the car it just replaced in almost every way.
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In case you hadn't noticed, Prince Philip, aka the Duke of Edinburgh, aka the Queen's hubby, aka Stavros, shuffled off this mortal coil on Friday and thus the UK entered a period of "national mourning". Far from citizens taking to the streets and screaming at the sky, fists balled in anguish, most folk are pretty chill about the passing of the nation's slightly inappropriate grandad, who missed hitting a century by about two months. This collective "mourning" was nowhere more keenly felt than on nationalrail.co.uk, whose overlords deemed it necessary to render the train booking website in greyscale as a tribute to Phil. There's your sort-of-IT angle. But far from the maudlin design choice inspiring bittersweet memories of that time when Prince Phil told a 13-year-old kid he was "too fat to be an astronaut", it instead invoked the ire of visually impaired users. Indeed, some of the Reg readers who got in touch insisted that "a black and white colour scheme for everything" was an absolutely dreadful idea, especially "if you can't see clearly ([and] especially when things like bold text and links can become indistinguishable)." "As a mark of respect for the passing of an elderly gentleman, they've stopped any other folk with failing eyesight from using the site." National Rail went hard on the damage control this morning, deleting some tweets and pinning this message to the top of its feed: The National Rail website has been temporarily greyscaled as a mark of respect following the death of HRH Duke of Edinburgh. We are listening to feedback about how people are using the website and are making further changes today to make it more accessible to all our customers. — National Rail (@nationalrailenq) April 12, 2021 And what, pray, might that feedback include? "Looking to book a train ticket and... struggling with it in greyscale," said one visitor. "@nationalrailenq why's it gone black and white? Thanks." To which the service's Twitter wrangler responded: "Hello, we've put our website into black and white as mark of respect for Prince Phillip [sic] who passed away last week. Do you need any help with your booking?" "Oh okay, is there a way to change it back please? Finding it very hard to use..." "I don't think there is I'm afraid. We're keeping the grey-scale until the end of the week I think... Sorry for the inconvenience of all this." Others were less forgiving. Sorry, but this is objectively insane. — James Cherry (@lechuzzles) April 12, 2021 How about showing a mark of respect for your living, visually-impaired customers? Just a thought. — Amy T 💙 (@JolinarSG1) April 12, 2021 Just going to be really direct, you are actively making your website more difficult for disabled people to use, and that's not a worthwhile trade off to make. — Laura Kate Dale (@LaurakBuzz) April 12, 2021 Oh dear. But the fix was pretty simple – ad/tracker blockers. Yes, while researching this story (read: laughing at the Twitter bloodbath), it took us a minute to figure out what everyone was going on about because nationalrail.co.uk looked its usual full-colour mess to us. It was only when we switched off our "shields" on the Brave b
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Good evening! A brief(ish?) note today about some Guile nargery.the arc of historyLike many language implementations that started life when you could turn on the radio and expect to hear Def Leppard, Guile has a bottom half and a top half. The bottom half is written in C and exposes a shared library and an executable, and the top half is written in the language itself (Scheme, in the case of Guile) and somehow loaded by the C code when the language implementation starts.Since 2010 or so we have been working at replacing bits written in C with bits written in Scheme. Last week's missive was about replacing the implementation of dynamic-link from using the libltdl library to using Scheme on top of a low-level dlopen wrapper. I've written about rewriting eval in Scheme, and more recently about how the road to getting the performance of C implementations in Scheme has been sometimes long.These rewrites have a quixotic aspect to them. I feel something in my gut about rightness and wrongness and I know at a base level that moving from C to Scheme is the right thing. Much of it is completely irrational and can be out of place in a lot of contexts -- like if you have a task to get done for a customer, you need to sit and think about minimal steps from here to the goal and the gut doesn't have much of a role to play in how you get there. But it's nice to have a project where you can do a thing in the way you'd like, and if it takes 10 years, that's fine.But besides the ineffable motivations, there are concrete advantages to rewriting something in Scheme. I find Scheme code to be more maintainable, yes, and more secure relative to the common pitfalls of C, obviously. It decreases the amount of work I will have when one day I rewrite Guile's garbage collector. But also, Scheme code gets things that C can't have: tail calls, resumable delimited continuations, run-time instrumentation, and so on.Taking delimited continuations as an example, five years ago or so I wrote a lightweight concurrency facility for Guile, modelled on Parallel Concurrent ML. It lets millions of fibers to exist on a system. When a fiber would need to block on an I/O operation (read or write), instead it suspends its continuation, and arranges to restart it when the operation becomes possible.A lot had to change in Guile for this to become a reality. Firstly, delimited continuations themselves. Later, a complete rewrite of the top half of the ports facility in Scheme, to allow port operations to suspend and resume. Many of the barriers to resumable fibers were removed, but the Fibers manual still names quite a few.Scheme read, in SchemeWhich brings us to today's note: I just rewrote Guile's reader in Scheme too! The reader is the bit that takes a stream of characters and parses it into S-expressions. It was in C, and now is in Scheme.One of the primary motivators for this was to allow read to be suspendable. With this change, read-eval-print loops are now implementable on fibers.Another motivation was to finally fix a bug in which Guile couldn't record source locations for some kinds of datums. It used to be that Guile would use a weak-key hash table to associate
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Column You won't be paying an Oracle tax on your next Android phone. After 10 years of Big Red claiming dibs on Android internals and Google telling them to GTFO, the legals have finally been settled by the US Supreme Court. Google has won. The case was in many ways a classic troll. Way back when, Google thought Java SE would be a good platform to build its new Android phone around. That didn't work out, thank your favourite deity, so Google wrote its own platform with just enough Java structure to bring caffeinated programmers – of whom there were millions – along for the ride. Everyone was happy until Oracle turned up. It fancied a new revenue line for the profit centre it called its legal department. Looking around, Oracle discovered and hauled away the dying Sun with – aha – intellectual property that could be weaponised. Most notably, Google's little shards of Java API. There were other things too, like patents, but they soon fell by the wayside. As the court case crept up the American legal system, it became widely understood to be about whether you can copyright APIs. Oracle said yes, and Google had infringed that copyright. Google said no, and anyway even if it had, the "fair use" aspect of copyright applied. Over a decade on, and millions in legal fees, Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle in Java API legal war READ MORE For a reasonably obscure intersection of law and coding, this case assumed enormous importance. Rightly so. If APIs were copyrightable, IBM could have closed down the PC clone industry at birth. It and Microsoft in turn would be open to a case from earlier microcomputer makers and Digital Research, both of whom could point to amazing similarities between their APIs and those in the IBM BIOS and Microsoft's MS-DOS. In fact, most of what we now think of as open, competitive computing could not have evolved. You wouldn't have been able to build an alternative component, hardware or software, that used the API of the thing it replaced – not without permission. Even using an API in an application might be problematic. The entire industry has operated on the assumption that APIs aren't copyright. Does this mean that APIs can't be copyrighted? No. It means that no court has decided whether they can or cannot. And although Google asked the Supreme Court to finally declare for freedom, the court refused – saying instead that even if "for the sake of argument" APIs could be copyright, Google's defence of "fair use" was upheld. (You can and should read the court's decision [PDF], which explains all of this in admirably clear language.) Why no decision on APIs? You may think this a missed opportunity to defuse a nuclear warhead at the heart of modern computing, and you'd be right. The court could easily have said that APIs did not qualify for copyright protection, and that would have been that. If Google had asked for relief on those grounds alone, perhaps it may even have happened. But Google did a belt-and-braces defence, and the Supremes thought the belt good enough. The decision did make two points about the API copyright issue. It listed all the reasons under US copyright law why API
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Many readers will be familiar with the final scene of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, in which the Ark of the Covenant, having been retrieved by Indiana Jones, is placed in a crate and wheeled off to be lost in the seemingly infinite depths of a dusty Government warehouse. Who knows what treasures lurk in such fabled taxpayer-funded repositories, and as if to prove their vast potential, [Arthur O’Dwyer] relates a tale of digital archaeology in which the entire source code of a game thought long-lost was regurgitated with the help of a civil servant. The game in question is Castlequest, which he had played in the 1980s on the now-defunct GEnie online service. One of very few on
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What are you doing this week? Feel free to share! Keep in mind it’s OK to do nothing at all, too. I started a job as a PhD student so currently reading up on scientific literature. It’s super interesting although it’s maddening that the notation is not really standardized so far and that makes it harder to read what’s actually being done in the paper. Putting the finishing touches on my Lobsters client for Android before it is published to Google Play. Some time this week I will also be starting work on my first client
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Feature Times change, and so has the www. Cast your mind back 20 years. Web pages used to be svelte little things, really just text and images, with the occasional Flash banner ad thrown in for good measure. Now, they're applications, with even the simplest of pages buried under a mountain of JavaScript. We could argue all day over whether this is a necessary evil or a cancer on the modern internet. One thing is certain: the march of time has rendered the web all but inaccessible to older (yet still functional) machines. One new project aims to change that, translating the cacophony of the modern web to something that can be comprehended by the most early of web browsers.
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By Leo KelionTechnology desk editorimage copyrightPA Mediaimage captionMakers of the NHS Covid-19 app had planned to ask infected users to share their check-in historiesAn update to England and Wales's contact tracing app has been blocked for breaking the terms of an agreement made with Apple and Google.The plan had been to ask users to upload logs of venue check-ins - carried out via poster barcode scans - if they tested positive for the virus. This could be used to warn others.But the two firms had explicitly banned such a function from the start.Under the terms that all health authorities signed up to in order to use Apple and Google's privacy-centric contact-tracing tech, they had to agr
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April 2021 Summary: This article presents Mugo, a single-pass compiler for a tiny subset of the Go programming language. It outputs (very naive) x86-64 assembly, and supports just enough of the language to implement a Mugo compiler: int and string types, slices, functions, locals, globals, and basic expressions and statements. Go to: Which subset? | Codegen | Lexer and Parser | Performance | Related projects I’ve been fascinated with compilers since I started coding. One of my first programming projects was “Third”, a self-hosted Forth compiler for 8086 DOS. Forth is incredibly easy to compile: there are no expressions or statements, and each space-separated token gets c
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X-Seed 4000X-Sen Shushi 4000The design of X-Seed 4000General informationStatusNever builtTypeMixed useLocationTokyo, JapanHeightRoof4,000 m (13,123 ft)Technical detailsFloor count800 The X-Seed 4000 was a concept skyscraper.[1] The idea was initially created and developed by Martin Pascoe. Its proposed 4-kilometre (2.5 mi) height, 6-kilometre-wide (3.7 mi) sea-base, and 800-floor capacity could accommodate 500,000 to 1,000,000 inhabitants. This structure would be composed of over 3,000,000 tons of steel. It was designed for Tokyo, Japan by the Taisei Corporation in 1995 as a futuristic environment combining ultra-modern and technological living and interaction with wildlife and natu
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There’s a neat pattern that doesn’t seem to be well known. Until I joined the Application Development Team at Vortexa (we’re hiring), I hadn’t actually heard of it - but now I use it quite often. It’s called switch true and it’s really simple. Basic Switch Click here to skip the recap of the basic switch statement. Most JavaScript developers are familiar with the switch statement (mdn docs), but for those who are newer to the language, let’s briefly go over it. The switch statement lets you match an expression against one of a number of different cases: const city = "London"; const getCountryByCity = () => { switch (city) { case "Edinburgh": return "Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland"; case "Madrid": return "Madrid is the capital city of Spain"; case "London": return "London is the capital city of England"; default: return "Cannot find which country this city is the capital of."; } }; In this example, the expression (city variable) is matched against each case in the switch statement. If the case matches the result of the expression, the case will be executed - in this example it will return a string. Switch (true) The fundamental principle of the switch true pattern is that you can match against expressions as well as values. An expression in a case will be evaluated before matching. If the expression in your case evaluates to true - it will be matched. switch (true) { case 1 + 1 === 2: default: } Why is this useful This pattern can be used in so many different situations - often to replace complex if/else statements. A common scenario this pattern becomes handy in is if you are validating data and have a set of criteria which will cause the validation to fail: const user = { firstName: "Seán", lastName: "Barry", email: "[email protected]", number: "00447123456789", }; if (!user) { throw new Error("User must be defined."); } else if (!user.firstName) { throw new Error("User's first name must be defined"); } else if (typeof user.firstName !== "string") { throw new Error("User's first name must be a string"); } else if ( return user; This can be re-written using switch
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Welcome back to Supercalifragilistic! This time I’m changing the format a bit. I wanted to deliver actionable insights for product teams, and finding real-life examples from well-performing products felt like a great place to start. So I sat down with Justin Gage from Retool and asked him about a feature launch that went well. Read on 📖.New here? Subscribe to get the next editions 💌Re-what now?Let’s kick off with a word on Retool and the problem it solves. Simply put, Retool helps you build a better back-office, faster. If you’ve worked for a large tech company, chances are you’ve met engineers working on internal tools. Well, Retool is handling this tedious work for them so they can focus on other problems. Not only that, but they made building your back-office fun in the process. You should try it! It’s like popping up components from your design system in Figma, except in Retool they come to life in seconds.And if you haven’t listened to Rick Astley for a while I recommend checking their design system documentation. It sets the tone for what to expect in the product: simple and effective.Am I smelling another no-code tool?Retool positions itself as a tool for technical folks, and you’ll need to be comfortable with basic SQL and Javascript to get the most ou
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The UK's Office for National Statistics (ONS) has strongly denied it hands census data over to police and law enforcement agencies – and claims it has "never" handed personal information to the security services. In a Freedom of Information Act response published on its website, the ONS came out fighting when a member of the public asked if the stats agency handed personal data from the UK census to law enforcement bodies. Concern has swirled for years about the security of census data, both from ne'er-do-wells and state snoopers looking to expand their little empires. With the British government's finely honed instinct for casually repurposing data collected for good reasons into something completely different, it's right that people want to know that data innocently handed to the government isn't going to be turned against them later on. Somebody asked whether this 2011 commentary on the census by Amberhawk Training was still accurate 10 years later. It highlighted how census data could be lawfully purloined by government agencies for their own purposes. Uncompromisingly, the ONS replied: The UKSA [Statistic Authority], the ONS and the National Statistician will never volunteer to disclose personal information for any non-statistical purpose. If disclosure is sought, such as through a court order, the UKSA and the National Statistician will always refuse to allow it, and will contest the case to the maximum extent possible under the law, using each stage of appeal in the Courts if necessary, in order to ensure statistical confidentiality; and will do so in an open, public and transparent manner, to the extent permitted under the law. Not only that, the agency said it had "never passed information onto the security services." Such an unambiguous response is exceedingly rare from any organ of the British state – and is all the more welcome for it. The law is section 39 of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007. Subsection 4 lists all the occasions on which the state can help itself to census data for any reason other than counting how many people are at home on a given day, including for "criminal investigation" or to "approve
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Bonjour Paris! We are Äike* The cold Northern winds have brought us here to France to spark a change. *you don't need to pronounce it, you need to experience it! Black Thunder Blue Breeze Red Riding Hood Grey Area White Knight Äike is the pioneer of quality e-scooters. Setting new standards for user experience with customised end-user App and the longest battery and frame warranty. #rideäike #rideäike #rideäike #rideäike #rideäike #rideäike #rideäike #rideäike #rideäike #rideäike #rideäike Virtually un-stealable. We
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Technical interviews are generally dreaded, just like every other interview. However, technical interviews include many elements that non-technical folks might find mystifying or even pointless, such as whiteboard problem solving, take-home assignments, design sessions, or even just straight brain teasers. [Erik McClure] went a bit off the beaten path and started using the factory builder game Factorio as a technical interview. Many point to the intent behind the problems and tricky questions inherent in whiteboard coding exercises and assert that the focus is not to complete the problem, but rather to expose how a candidate thinks and problem solves. Factorio is all problem-solving as you work as a team to slowly scale up a humble production line to a massive factory,
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An illegal prime is a prime number that represents information whose possession or distribution is forbidden in some legal jurisdictions. One of the first illegal primes was found in 2001. When interpreted in a particular way, it describes a computer program that bypasses the digital rights management scheme used on DVDs. Distribution of such a program in the United States is illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.[1] An illegal prime is a kind of illegal number. History[edit] One of the earliest illegal prime numbers was generated in March 2001 by Phil Carmody. Its binary representation corresponds to a compressed version of the C source code of a computer program implementing the DeCSS decryption algorithm, which can be used by a computer to circumvent a DVD's copy prot
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In previous post, I implemented a simple HTTPS client, but the program has a small flaw, i.e., when connecting to “www.google.com:443“, it will report following error in verifying certificate: error code is 18:self signed certificate error code is from SSL_get_verify_result: long SSL_get_verify_result(const SSL *ssl) { return ssl->verify_result; } and 18 is mapping to X509_V_ERR_DEPTH_ZERO_SELF_SIGNED_CERT, which means “self-signed certificate”. But for other websites, e.g., facebook.com, no error is outputted. Use OpenSSL‘s client-arg program to test: # LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/root/openssl/build gdb --args ./client-arg -connect "www.google.com:443" ...... Thread 2 hit Breakpoint 1, main (argc=3, argv=0xfffffc7fffdf4c38) at client-arg.c:99 99 BIO_puts(sbio, "GET / HTTP/1.0\n\n"); (gdb) p ssl->verify_result $1 = 18 (gdb) The same error code: 18. But openssl-s_client can guarantee the certificate is not “self-signed”: # LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/root/openssl/build openssl s_client -connect google.com:443 CONNECTED(00000004) depth=2 OU = GlobalSign Root CA - R2, O = GlobalSign, CN = GlobalSign verify return:1 depth=1 C = US, O = Google Trust Services
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Over the weekend, reports have come in of the recent massive Tesla solar roof price increase hitting several customers, some of whom have been waiting about a year with signed installation contracts. The price increase seems to apply to Tesla Powerwall installations, too, with the cost of those increasing by about 30%. Some customers have even already spent thousands of dollars in preparation for the job, and yet are being told that their solar roof installation will cost tens of thousands of dollars more than anticipated. The communication was sent out by Tesla yesterday, and it went to many customers. In addition to emails we’ve received on our tip line, a rapidly growing Tesla Motors Club forum thread details price increases for many longtime Tesla customers who have been waiting with signed contracts for up to a year or more. Some have brought up the possibility of legal action. Here’s the text of the email that’s been sent out: We have increased the price of Solar Roof and have added adjustments for individual roof complexity. Learn More You will receive an email in the next 1-2 days when your new agreement is ready for your review and acceptance before moving forward. If you are no longer interested in moving forward with Solar Roof, you can cancel your order by logging into your Tesla Account and your deposit will automatically be refunded. We will be prioritizing customers based on the order in which they accept their updated agreements. Upon logging into their accounts, customers have found price increases often around 30% or more above the previous agreed-upon pricing. Some even claim to have been told explicitly that their price would not i
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Like computers, coffee is complex, easy to sink money into, and attracts a vast swath of opinions. And like computers, there is a wise middle path you can walk to get top-notch coffee at home without spending MacBook-like money on brewing gear. Image via Mat Honan.What will you get out of this treatise on slightly snob-ish coffee? A better understanding of why the standard means of buying, storing, and making coffee leaves much to be desired, followed by a rundown of some of the better, and less expensive, coffee-making methods—what I call hand-crafted coffee—and how it's sometimes faster, and usually more fun, than making a pot of the classic drip stuff.There are two things you should know up front. First: I'm not a coffee expert. In fact, as of a month ago, my coffee came primarily from baristas, a Keurig single-serve machine (photographic evidence here, a standard drip machine, or, on leisurely weekends, a French press that I knew two-thirds of the instructions for. To rectify this, I spent a month experimenting with at-home coffee methods, foisting blind taste tests on friends and co-workers, and researching what I call the Taste-to-Fuss Ratio. I also betrayed everything I once held dear about caffeine dependency,G/O Media may get a commissionSecond: Your taste in coffee is unique to mine. You might be looking for a smooth, gentle cup to accompany your drive to work, while I'm hoping my next cup tastes like pure Arabic gold. You get the freshest, single-source beans y
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Iran has admitted that one of its nuclear facilities went offline over the weekend, and a single report claiming Israeli cyber-weapons were the cause has been widely accepted as a credible explanation for the incident. Iran on Sunday published this announcement that said an “accident” impacted the “electricity distribution network” at its Natanz enrichment facility. The facility was inaugurated the previous day, and is thought to have the capability to enrich Uranium and to represent capacity for uses prohibited under the US/Iran nuclear deal. The Trump administration tore up t
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Evidence is thin, but Natanz enrichment facility is offline Iran has admitted that one of its nuclear facilities went offline over the weekend, and a single report claiming Israeli cyber-weapons were the cause has been widely accepted as a credible explanation for the incident. Iran on Sunday published this announcement that said an “accident” impacted the “electricity distribu
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Who, Me? We return to the Cold War in today's Who, Me? Start your week with suspected sabotage, computer sleuthery, and a satisfying slug of Grand Marnier deep in the heart of 1970s Москва. It was 1978 and our reader was working for a firm that had just sold a computer to the company that manufactured the Moskvitch. Sadly now defunct, the Moskvitch was the must-have car of the time for citizens of the Soviet Union (officially, at least). Despite being the butt of a thousand jokes, demand for the vehicle outstripped supply and people found themselves with a substantial wait before
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In the last months, we travelled around, and with this release, we tried to implement some improvements based on our experience with the daily application of the TorBox. The most significant improvement is abolishing wicd and introducing our new TorBox Wireless Manager (TWM). Not only is the TWM much easier to use, but it also doesn’t need so much power. Another pleasant novelty is the support of Azur-Meek and Snowflake, which should also work in China. During our travels, we have noticed incorrect DNS resolution regarding torproject.org in some countries. Probably, this is a kind of cheap censorship mechanism. For this reason, during the installation and updates, local DNS resolutions are made through Google’s and Cloudflare’s Domain Name Servers instead of using th
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This is my obligatory post explaining how to use the blog engine I created in Chicken Scheme. You should know this blog uses wing. You can see the repo here. Prior Work There are a number of static site generators out there and just about every language has one. Chicken Scheme even had one that existed already but I found it to not have been updated, and not as easy to use as I would've liked. So I made wing. It takes inspiration from a few different lisp static site generators. The first is hyde which is the preexisting Chicken Scheme blog engine. wing uses a lot of the same libraries, and I learned how to use the atom library by looking at hyde source code. The second is haunt. I liked how haunt setup the meta information in the markdown post itself. Wing There are few unique features a
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In shell scripting you sometimes come across comparisons where each value is prefixed with "x". Here are some examples from GitHub: if [ "x${JAVA}" = "x" ]; then if [ "x${server_ip}" = "xlocalhost" ]; then if test x$1 = 'x--help' ; then I’ll call this the x-hack. For any POSIX compliant shell, the value of the x-hack is exactly zero: this comparison works without the x 100% of the time. But why was it a thing? Online sources like this stackoverflow Q&A are a little handwavy, saying it’s an alternative to quoting (oof), pointing towards issues with "some versions" of certain shells, or generally cautioning against the mystic behaviors of especially ancient Unix system without concrete examples. To determine whether or not ShellCheck should warn about this, and if so, what its long form
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Alibaba has humbly accepted that it broke China's antitrust laws and will pay a colossal fine. Chinese authorities fined Alibaba Group US$2.77B on Saturday, the largest antitrust penalty Beijing has ever issued. The fine represents four percent of Alibaba's most recent full-year earnings. China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) issued a statement detailing Alibaba's transgressions and its investigation. “Since 2015, Alibaba Group has abused its dominant position in the market and has imposed ‘choose one out of two’ requirements on merchants on the platform,” said SAMR. SAMR said Alibaba's rules prohibited merchants from opening stores or participating in promotional activities on rival platforms. SAMR also claimed Alibaba used market forces, p
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In this post, I share why I chose Jekyll Now and Github Pages to build this blog. As I grow older, I have accumulated dozens of side projects that I have done or tried to do. Most of them fail or don’t get beyond a quick prototype. Nevertheless, in almost all of them I have learned some new technology, and in the end these learnings are the most valuable result of these side projects. I wanted to create a blog to share this knowledge, with these requirements: Full control the web page. Instead of using a hosted service like Facebook or Medium, as I strongly believe in a decentralized web. “Just work”. I want a system that let me focus on writing instead of running the website. Minimalist. I want it to be minimalist, both visually and in functionality. Good ergonomics
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A decent current measurement sensor ought to be an essential part of every hacker’s workbench. One that is capable of measuring DC, as well as low and high frequencies with reasonable accuracy. And bonus credits if it can also withstand high bus voltages – such as those found in mains utility or electric vehicle work. [Undersilicon] couldn’t find one that ticked all the boxes, so he built an ACS730 based AC/DC current probe capable of measuring up to 25 A at frequencies up to 1 MHz. Allegro Microsystems has a wide offering of current sensor IC’s. The ACS730 features a -3 dB bandwidth of 1 MHz, and -1 dB bandwidth of 500 kHz. Since it is galvanically isolated, it can be used in AC mains applications up to 297 Vrms and for DC
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Just 10 miles off the coast of Los Angeles lurks an environmental disaster over 70 years in the making, which few have ever heard about. That is, until now, thanks to the research of a University of California marine scientist named David Valentine.  Working with little more than rumors and a hunch, curiosity guided him 3,000 feet below the ocean's surface. A few hours of research time and an autonomous robotic submersible unearthed what had been hidden since the 1940s: countless barrels of toxic waste, laced with DDT, littering the ocean floor in between Long Beach and Catalina Island.  Dr. David Valentine The fact that his underwater camera spotted dozens of decaying barre
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India’s Software Freedom Law Center has assisted an open-source developer and advocate to challenge the nation’s new Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code on grounds it imposes unfair burdens on developers. A petition [PDF] to the Kerala High Court filed by Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, a free and open-source software (FOSS) developer, former Pirate Party candidate, and volunteer member of the Free Software Community of India, points out that numerous open-source projects are covered by the new Code. Arimbrathodiyil’s petition argues that software such as the open Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), or the Diaspora messaging tool, could therefore covered by the new code’s requirement for users to be identifiable by Indian authorities and for messag
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DawnOS is a new operating system designed to not only do away with the inefficiencies of mainstream OSes like Windows, but “to liberate people from the imperialistic oppression" of Intel. Its creator, who goes only by Geri, built it on a subleq chip, with subleq a “One Instruction-Set Computer” (or OISC), a programming language/architecture with only a single command. This means the language lacks goto and while for flow control, or if for branching, or even increment, replacing them all with only a single operation – yet it is Turing Complete, capable of supporting an entire operating system. I spoke with the creator of DawnOS, and the text of our interview runs below, but it may be helpful first to have an introduction to subleq. The SUBLEQ language OISCs (prono
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This is a story about a successful system that nevertheless failed to make the cut. An experimental LED brightness adjustment is something [Mitxela] explored in a project for a high-precision clock; one that shows time down to the nearest millisecond, and won’t flicker or otherwise look weird when photographed with a high-speed camera. To pull this off means reinventing many things about a clock display, including how to handle brightness adjustment elegantly. Now, to be clear, the brightness adjustment idea described here is something that did not end up being used, but it’s interesting enough that [Mitxela] wrote it up and we’re very glad he did. The idea was to have a smooth and seamless automatic brightness adjustment, ideally with no added components. Since LEDs can be
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America's plan to compete with China includes a call for the land of the free to dominate tech standards bodies, especially for 5G, and to appoint an ambassador level official to lead a new “Technology Partnership Office” that Washington will use to drive tech collaboration among like-minded nations. Released last Thursday by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and expected to have bipartisan support, the draft Strategic Competition Act of 2021 offers 281 pages of policy aimed at “ensuring the United States is postured to compete with China for decades to come,” in the words of ranking member US Senator Jim Risch (R-Idaho). The bill [PDF] devotes a section to “digital technology and connectivity,” the first item of which is a “statement of policy on leadership in
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[This is a transcript of the video embedded below.] Space, the way we experience it, has three dimensions. Left-right, forward backward, and up-down. But why three? Why not 7? Or 26? The answer is: No one knows. But if no one knows why space has three dimensions, could it be that it actually has more? Just that we haven’t noticed for some reason? That’s what we will talk about today. The idea that space has more than three dimensions may sound entirely nuts, but it’s a question that physicists have seriously studied for more than a century. And since there’s quite a bit to say about it, this video will have two parts. In this part we will talk about the origins of the idea of extra dimensions, Kaluza-Klein theory and all that. And in the next part, we will talk about more r
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Why you might want to stop talking about your anxiety and try this insteadPhoto: Kittiphan Teerawattanakul/EyeEm/Getty ImagesLet’s back up 50,000 years or so. Imagine you’re a Neanderthal taking a leisurely stroll through the fields. Suddenly, in the nearby bushes, you hear a tiger. In a nanosecond, your entire body starts reacting. Your pulse quickens, your breathing gets shallow, your eyes dilate, your body starts producing adrenaline.Everything happening in your body is good; you’re prepared to survive this tiger encounter. There’s just one small problem. It wasn’t a tiger. It was a tiny prehistoric weasel. Now your body is primed for fight-or-flight, your heart is racing, you’re totally jacked up on adrenaline… but there is no danger.This is your body on anxiety. Replace the (nonexistent) tiger in the bushes with social media, traffic, politics, Covid-19, money, childcare, climate change, work stress, family drama, and you can quickly see why anxiety is the most common mental illness in America, affecting nearly 20% of the population. Modern-day humans are basically a bunch of freaked-out Neanderthals in fight-or-flight mode 24/7.“Anxiety is an impulse in our body that says, ‘I’m not safe right now,’” says Elizabeth Stanley, PhD, the author of Widen The Window: Training Your Body and Brain to Thrive During Stress and Recover from Trauma. “It’s automatic, really fast and unconscious.”In her work, Stanley makes the distinction between the thinking brain, our neocortex, responsible for decision-making, reasoning, ethics, conscious memory, learning, and the survival brain — the limbic system, brain stem, and cerebellum — which handles our
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C++ std::unique_ptr that represents each object as an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain. Follow us: worthdoingbadly.com | @zhuowei | @[email protected] auto ptr1 = make_nft<Cow>(); nft_ptr ptr2; ptr2 = std::move(ptr1); This transfers the Non-Fungible Token 0x7faa4bc09c90, representing the Cow's memory address, from ptr1 (OpenSea, Etherscan) to ptr2 (OpenSea, Etherscan). [2021-04-09T01:59:48Z INFO nft_ptr_lib] Transferring 0x7faa4bc09c90 (Cow) to 0x7ffee35a7890 (0x1564b0a7c258fc88a96aa9fe1c513101883abb13) from 0x7ffee35a78a8 (0x9ed6006c6f3bb20737bdbe88cc6aa0de00597fef) at PC=0x10c65a946 (main (example.cpp:33)) [2021-04-09T02:00:15Z INFO nft_ptr_lib] Transaction: 0xcbe06fdd54bd9d221993c875022fe2960128874811a25075d692cc638a28f290 [2021-04-09T02:00:15Z INFO nft_ptr_lib] https://testnets.opensea.io/assets/goerli/0x90eaf0ab2c6455a9b794f9dcf97839fa25b4ce2d/0x7faa4bc09c90 After the transfer, ptr1 is set to null, and ptr2 contains the new object, just like std::unique_ptr: std::cout << "Moved: ptr1 = " << ptr1.get() << " ptr2 = " << ptr2.get() << std::endl; ptr2->MakeNoise(); Moved: ptr1 = 0x0 ptr2 = 0x7faa4bc09c90 Moo! auto ptr1 = make_nft<Cow>(); This: initializes the nft_ptr runtime creates the first nft_ptr<Cow> transfers ownership of the newly created Cow* to the nft_ptr First, it creates an ERC-721 smart contract that represents each memory address as a Non-Fungible Token. [2021-04-09T01:57:48Z INFO nft_ptr_lib] Connected to network id 5 [2021-04-09T01:57:48Z INFO nft_ptr_lib] Account: 0xd54b39c6bb7774aba2be4b49dc2667332b737909 [2021-04-09T01:57:48Z INFO nft_ptr_lib] https://goerli.etherscan.io/address/0xd54b39c6bb7774aba
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Work directly with the CEO and CTO to build a better UI for maritime operations from scratch. You will have the opportunity to design and build the interface primitives that lay the foundation for maritime software for the next ten years. This is the right job if you like building things that have never existed before, are excited by new challenges and understand that products live and die on the user experience. If successful, you will help decide the future of Greywing, as well as lay the roadmap for all future development of the interface. You will be aided in making key decisions about the stack, development process and guiding principles. Some of the things we've done so far: Build an easy to use routing engine for vessels Design intelligence software to compress hundreds of points of information (flights, agencies, fuel, restrictions) into quick decisions. For an illustrative example, check out https://grey-wing.com. As an example of what you will be working on, here are two key ongoing projects: Design a light interface based on mapbox that allows a ship manager to have instant situational awareness of over 100 vessels within two clicks. Develop an omnibox (Cmd+K) that enables easy navigation of the platform, and to perform context-sensitive actions. To understand what drives us, a good place to start is the Greywing Product Manifesto, which outlines our guiding principles and development strategy for the platform. Who are we? Greywing is a maritime intelligence tool that enables ship managers to conduct operations and save thousands of dollars by providing actionable insight into the decisions they make. Simply put, we process hundreds of thousands of points of information about a vessel to tell them where it should go and what it should do. We are backed by the people at Y Combinator, Instacart and Flexport. We work with the world's largest ship managers and operators to make the global shipping network more efficient while protecting the people who make sure our world runs smoothly. In the past year, we've conducted charter flight operations for vessels calling at Singapore, helped evacuate wounded crew that would not have been possible otherwise,
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On Thursday, the defense in the Derek Chauvin trial played a body cam video clip of the arrest of George Floyd, that subsequently led to his death. As part of their broader strategy of casting aspersions on Mr. Floyd’s character to sow doubt among the members of the jury, they played an audio clip with multiple speakers and significant background noise, and claimed that Mr. Floyd said “I ate too many drugs.” They attempted to convince the witness on the stand, a use-of-force expert from the LAPD, that Mr. Floyd had said “I ate too many drugs.” Initially, the expert agreed, but he very shortly took that back, and stated he thought he might have heard “I ain’t do no drugs.” I was made aware of this shortly after it happened, and subsequently many people reached out to me about it, because I am an expert on African American English (AAE) structure and accents, and I am an expert on miscomprehension and misrepresentation of AAE in the courtroom. After reviewing and analyzing the audio, it is my expert professional opinion that Mr. Floyd did *not* say "I ate too many drugs," and instead said "I ain't do any drugs." I took to Twitter to write a short thread about the audio in question, and
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Noncombatant 😚 About 🤓 Other Writing 🧐 Bandcamp 🎵 11 April 2021 Apparently, there is some confusion about whether sandboxing is necessary, sufficient, and/or affordable. (Here is an example from Security Week, although this is not the only instance.) As the lead of Chrome’s sandboxing team and as co-lead of Chrome’s memory safety efforts, perhaps I can clarify a little. As I said in my Enigma presentation (slide 7), “good sandboxing is table stakes.” I reiterated this point in my previous post (“if [...] your application is not making use of process sandboxing, consider exploring that first before starting a rewrite effort”). Contrary to what the Security Week article and some Twitter discourse suggest, sandboxing and memory safety are complementary techniques, and both are necessary. Sandboxing reduces the severity of bugs. Sandboxing isolates code away from system resources and application resources, reducing the damage that compromise can do. (Sandboxing also has certain efficiency advantages, as well as disadvantages, too.) However, a certain amount of attack surface will always be available from within a sandbox, and memory unsafety (and other bugs) can enable an attacker to get at it. So you still need to get rid of as many bugs inside the sandbox as possible. Memory safety reduces the number of bugs. As discussed at Enigma and in my previous post, very many bugs, including an overwhelming majority of the vulnerabilities we know about right now, are due to memory unsafety. It helps to get rid of as many of those as possible. However, memory safety can’t constrain access to system resources, including the file system, system calls, et c. So you still need sandboxing. There are 2 key ways that Chromium (specifically) is nearing the limits of how much sandboxing we can do right now: Our unit of isolation, the process, is expensive in time and space on some (not all) platforms. Some operating systems do not provide sufficiently fine-grained mechanisms to allow us to maximally constrain sandboxed processes. Things are improving, but it’s an unavoidably slow process. I tried also to raise aware
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A Machine Learning Framework for Julia MLJ (Machine Learning in Julia) is a toolbox written in Julia providing a common interface and meta-algorithms for selecting, tuning, evaluating, composing and comparing over 150 machine learning models written in Julia and other languages. In particular MLJ wraps a large number of scikit-learn models.MLJ is released under the MIT licensed and sponsored by the Alan Turing Institute.Lightning tourFor more elementary introductions to MLJ usage see Basic introductions below.The first code snippet below creates a new Julia environment MLJ_tour and installs just those packages needed for the tour. See Installation for more on creating a Julia environment for use with MLJ.Julia installation instructions are here.using Pkg Pkg.activate("MLJ_tour", shared=true) Pkg.add("MLJ") Pkg.add("MLJIteration") Pkg.add("EvoTrees")In MLJ a model is just a container for hyper-parameters, and that's all. Here we will apply several kinds of model composition before binding the resulting "meta-model" to data in a machine for evaluation using cross-validation.Loading and instantiating a gradient tree-boosting model:using MLJ Booster = @load EvoTreeRegressor # loads code defining a model type booster = Booster(max_depth=2) # specify hyper-parameter at construction booster.nrounds=50 # or mutate post factoThis model is an example of an iterative model. As is stands, the number of iterations nrounds is fixed.Composition 1: Wrapping the model to make it "self-iterating"Let's create a new model that automatically learns the number of iterations, using the NumberSinceBest(3) criterion, as applied to an out-of-sample l1 loss:using MLJIteration iterated_booster = IteratedModel(model=booster, resampling=Holdout(fraction_train=0.8), controls=[Step(2), NumberSinceBest(3), NumberLimit(300)], measure=l1, retrain=true)Composition 2: Preprocess the input featuresCombining the model with categorical feature encoding:pipe = @pipeline ContinuousEncoder iterated_boosterComposition 3: Wrapping the model to make it "self-t
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Spectrum threatening me for internet usage, anyone else had this lovely phone call from Security department lately?I told them I was just doing my backups to google, and they told me to stop doing that because I was impacting my neighbors service negatively. Even though they sold me 2 gigabit internet lines into my house and every step of the way told me there were no limits or caps. Now 6 months down the line they are upset I am using my upload as they sold it to me. Keep in mind they charged me $200 dollar activation fees per line for this service.
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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks during the Future Decoded Tech Summit in Bengaluru, India, on Feb. 25, 2020.Samyukta Lakshmi | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesMicrosoft is in advanced talks to acquire speech-recognition company Nuance Communications, a person familiar with the discussions told CNBC on Sunday. A transaction could be signed as early as Sunday and announced as soon as Monday, the person said.The plans illustrate Microsoft's recent efforts to expand through deals. Microsoft considered buying the U.S. operations of video-sharing app TikTok last year, and last month it completed the $7.5
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Bad news, Martian helicopter fans: Ingenuity, the autonomous helicopter that Perseverance birthed onto the Martian surface a few days ago, will not be taking the first powered, controlled flight on another planet today as planned. We’re working on a full story so we’ll leave the gory details for that, but the short version is that while the helicopter was undergoing a full-speed rotor test, a watchdog timer monitoring the transition between pre-flight and flight modes in the controller tripped. The Ingenuity operations team is going over the full telemetry and will reschedule the rotor test; as a result, the first flight will occur no earlier than Wednesday, April 14. We’ll be sure to keep you posted. Anyone who has ever been near a refinery or even a sewage treatment plant will have no doubt spotted flares of waste gas being burned off. It can be pretty spectacular, like an Olympic torch, but it also always struck us as spectacularly wasteful. Aside from the emissions, it always seemed like you could at least try to harness some of the energy in the waste gasses. But apparently the numbers just never work out in favor of tapping this source of energy, or at least that was the case until the proper buzzword concentration in the effluent was reached. With the soaring value of Bitcoin, and the fact that the network now consumes something like 80-TWh a year, building portable mining rigs into shipping containers that can be plugged into gas flaring stacks at refineries is now being looked at seriously. While we like the idea of not wasting a resource, we have our doubts about this; if it’s not profitable to tap into the waste gas stream to produce electricity now, what does tapping it to directly mine Bitcoin really add to the equation? What would you do if you discovered that your new clothes dryer was responsible for a gigabyte or more of traffic on your internet connection every day? We suppose in this IoT world, such things are to be expected, but a gig a day seems overly chatty for a dryer. The user who reported this over on the r/smarthome subreddit blocked the dryer at the router, which was probably about the only realistic option short of taking a Dremel to the WiFi section of the dryer’s control board. The owner is in contact with manufacturer LG to see if this perhaps represents an error condition; we’d actually love to see a Wire
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The move by authorities has faced opposition from fisheries and local governments. (Photo by Kosaku Mimura) April 9, 2021 15:34 JSTUpdated on April 9, 2021 17:16 JST | JapanTOKYO (Kyodo) -- The Japanese government has decided to release treated radioactive water accumulated at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant into the sea despite opposition from fishermen, a source familiar with the matter said Friday.It will hold a meeting of related ministers as early as Tuesday to formally decide on the plan, a major development following over seven years of discussions on how to discharge the water used to cool down melted fuel at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.The release into the sea of the treated water containing radioactive tritium, which is said to pose little risk to human health, is likely to provoke concern among consumers and neighboring countries such as China and South Korea. The government had initially hoped to make a decision on the discharge of the treated water in October last year but later decided it would need more time for discussions amid staunch concern about reputational damage to marine products.But Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said Wednesday his government will decide "in a few days" whether to release the water after meeting with Hiroshi Kishi, head of the national federation of fisheries cooperatives, who conveyed his organization's unwavering opposition to the plan.In February last year, a government panel proposed various options for disposing of the water, including releasing it into the ocean as well as evaporating it.The following month, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, the operator of the Fukushima nuclear plant, drafted a plan to dil
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Make your peace — Shine on, you lovable hard-drinking, bar brawling, foul-mouthed anti-Buffy. Waverly Earp (Dominique Provost-Chalkley) is trapped in a twisted version of the Garden of Eden. SyFy Wynonna (Melanie Scrofano) runs afoul of the new Sheriff and his sister—both members of the Clanton clan, which has a long-standing feud against the Earps. SyFy Margot Clanton (Paula Boudreau) vows revenge on Wynonna and her family. SyFy
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If we want the internet to be different we can’t keep following the same roadmap. I am celebrating a one-year anniversary at Mozilla this week, which is funny in a way, since I have been part of Mozilla since before it had a name. Mozilla is in my DNA–and some of my DNA is in Mozilla. Twenty-two years ago I wrote the open-source software licenses that still enable our vision, and throughout my years here I’ve worn many hats. But one year ago I became CEO for the second time, and I have to say up front that being CEO this time around is the hardest role I’ve held here. And perhaps the most rewarding. On this anniversary, I want to open up about what it means to be the CEO of a mission-driven organization in 2021, with all the complications and potential that this era of the internet brings with it. Those of you who know me, know I am generally a private person. However, in a time of rapid change and tumult for our industry and the world, it feels right to share some of what this year has taught me. Six lessons from my first year as CEO: 1 AS CEO I STRADDLE TWO WORLDS: There has always been a tension at Mozilla, between creating products that reflect our values as completely as we can imagine, and products that fit consumers’ needs and what is possible in the current environment. At Mozilla, we feel the push and pull of competing in the market, while always seeking results from a mission perspective. As CEO, I find myself embodying this central tension. It’s a tension that excites and energizes me. As co-founder and Chair, and Chief Lizard Wrangler of the Mozilla project before that, I have been the flag-bearer for Mozilla’s value system for many years. I see this as a role that extends beyond Mozilla’s employees. The CEO is responsible for all the employees, volunteers, products and launches and success of the company, while also being responsible for living up to the values that are at Mozilla’s core. Now, I once again wear both of these hats. I have leaned on the open-source playbook to help me fulfill both of these obligations, attempting to wear one hat at a time, sometimes taking one off and donning the other in the middle of the same meeting. But I also find I am becoming more adept at seamlessly switching between the two, and I find that I can be intensely product oriented, while maintaining our mission as my true north. 2 MOZILLA’S MISSION IS UNCHANGED BUT HOW WE GET THERE MUST: This extremely abnormal year, filled with violence, illness ,and struggle, has also confirmed something I already knew: that even amid so much flux, the DNA of Mozilla has not changed since we first formed the foundation out of the Netscape offices so many years ago. Yes, we expanded our mission statement once to be more explicit about the human experience as a more complete statement of our values. What has changed is the world around us. And — to stick with the DNA metaphor for a second here — that has changed the epigenetics of Mozilla. In other words, it has changed the way our DNA is expressed. 3 CHANGE REQUIRES FOLLOWING A NEW PATH: We want the internet to be different. We feel an urgency to create a new and better infr
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Introduction to the most famous equation in financeThe Black–Scholes model is a mathematical model simulating the dynamics of a financial market containing derivative financial instruments. Since its introduction in 1973 and refinement in the 1970s and 80s, the model has become the de-facto standard for estimating the price of stock options. The key idea behind the model is to hedge the options in an investment portfolio by buying and selling the underlying asset (such as a stock) in just the right way and as a consequence, eliminate risk. The method has later become known within finance as “continuously revised delta hedging”, and been adopted by many of the world’s foremost investment banks and hedge funds.The goal of this article is to explain the Black-Scholes equation’s mathematical foundation, underlying assumptions and implications.Happy reading!The Black–Scholes model is a mathematical model simulating the dynamics of a financial market containing derivative financial instruments such as options, futures, forwards and swaps. The key property of the model is that it shows that an option has a unique price regardless of the risk of the underlying security and its expected return. The model is based on a partial differential equation (PDE), the so-called Black-Scholes equation, from which one can deduce the Black-Scholes formula, which gives a theoretical estimate of the correct price of European stock options.AssumptionsThe original Black-Scholes model is based on a core assumption that the market consists of at least one risky asset (such as a stock) and one (essentially) risk-free asset, such as a money market fund, cash or a government bond. In addition, it assumes three properties of the two assets, and four of the market itself:Assumptions about the assets in the market are: 1. The rate of return on the risk-free asset is constant (thus effectively behaves as an interest rate); 2. The instantaneous log return of the risky asset’s price is assumed to behave as an infinitesimal random walk with constant drift and volatility, more precisely, according to geometric Brownian motion. 3. The risky asset does not pay a dividend.Assumptions about the market itself are: 1. There are no arbitrage (risk-free profit) opportunities; 2. It is possible to borrow and lend any amount of cash at the same rate as the interest rate of the risk-free asset; 3. It is possible to buy and sell any amount of the stock (including short selling); and 4. There are no transaction costs in the market (i.e. no commission for buying or selling securities or derivative instruments).In subsequent extensions of the original model, these assumptions have been revised to adjust for dynamic interest rates for the risk-free asset (Merton, 1976), transaction costs for buying and selling (Ingersoll, 1976) and dividend payouts for the risky asset (Whaley, 1981). In this essay, assume we are working with the original model, unless stated otherwise.Figure 1. Visual representation of European call option price/value with respect to strike price and stock price, as calculated using the Black-Scholes equationThe Black-Scholes equation is the partial differential equ
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Step One Download an iCard app and set up your account iCard is your digital wallet, which is linkable with the Walletmor implant. Step Two Activate and top up your implant in the iCard app link your Walletmor implant with your iCard account by typing its activation code in the app. Then, add money to your account.
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SeerSell beyond the store.Connect directly with founders of the best YC-funded startups.Sign up now ›About the rolehttps://www.helloseer.com/ Skills: JavaScript, Vue, HTML, CSS Our team needs a versatile lead frontend engineer. You will lead projects from start to finish and incrementally ship useful features. This includes designing, applying principles of good UX, and jumping into the Python/Django backend to keep projects moving. 3+ years professional experience. Strong Javascript skills. Positive and solution-oriented mindset. Communicate well with engineers and non-engineers alike. A strong team player, with a do whatever it takes attitude. Detail-oriented and can keep up with t
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This is my Thinkpad T410 with a 1st generation Intel Core i5 and 8 GB of RAM. It runs Arch Linux with Xfce. The macOS Mojave (chosen over Catalina or Big Sur for it’s lower resource usage) VM works surprisingly well with 3GB RAM, but even when the Windows VM was allocated that much, it was very sluggish. The Windows installation was very easy. All you have to do is download the ISO from Microsoft, and fill in your username, password, and product key in the “Express Installation” feature of Gnome Boxes. For MacOS, you can use the excellent scripts by foxlet to automatically download the image from Apple and provision a QEMU virtual machine. The installation will take some time
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This is a rudimentary online compiler for the Zig programming language. It is inspired by the Go playground. Setup The main server is a Go binary that serves up a single HTML page that allows you to enter your Zig code and then run it. To run it yourself, you will need a Go tool chain which can be installed via brew on a Mac. If you wish to run it locally, you must compile it for your GOOS and GOARCH but I have included a small shell script to make a Linux binary that Docker can use as well. You should also have Zig installed and accessible from within your $PATH on the host. Hosting In theory this could be run anywhere that a Docker container can execute. Google's Cloud Run ma
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Should you be self-isolating right now? You could check using the government's website*, but that would be boring - check by seeing if Prolog can satisfy the fact that you should be self-isolating. * jokes aside, please do use the government's website. This tool is for entertainment only and is probably broken, I haven't written any Prolog since university. Usage You'll need to have Prolog installed. If you use nix, just run nix-shell in the root of the repo. $ swipl should_i_isolate.pl Then enter should_isolate(your_name)., and Prolog will try and prove your query. Example run: ?- should_isolate(james). Has james got a high temperature (above 38 degrees celsius)? [y/n] Has ja
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It’s not infrequent that we see the combination of moisture sensors and water pumps to automate plant maintenance. Each one has a unique take on the idea, though, and solves problems in ways that could be useful for other applications as well. [Emiliano Valencia] approached the project with a few notable technologies worth gleaning, and did a nice writeup of his “Autonomous Solar Powered Irrigation Monitoring Station” (named Steve Waters as less of a mouthful). Of particular interest was [Emiliano]’s solution for 3D printing a threaded rod; lay it flat and shave off the top and bottom. You didn’t need the whole thread anyway, did you? Despite the relatively limi
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