captaincrowbar

My favourite example comes from the development of the modern picture of the formation of the solar system, when it was suggested that giant planets often swapped places during the early days of this and other planetary systems. This idea (now widely accepted as probably true) was known as the Jumping Jupiter hypothesis.

There's a good reason why Apple aren't making the small form factor phone lots of you are asking for: logistics.

The new SE requires very little new manufacturing capacity. The case and probably battery are from the iPhone 8; the CPU/GPU/SOC and most of the rest of the electronics are from the iPhone 11; the camera still seems to be a slightly unknown quantity but the specs suggest it has a lot in common with the iPhone X camera. No doubt a certain amount of tricky engineering was required to put those parts together efficiently, but the SE requires almost no new manufacturing capacity beyond the final assembly line. For Apple it's pretty much a no-brainer.

A hypothetical "iPhone Classic", with modern innards in an iPhone 4/5 form factor case, would be a very different matter. You couldn't combine the 11's CPU with the 5's battery - battery life would be laughable. So you'd need to use a CPU from an earlier model; I suspect you'd have to go back at least to the 8 to find a CPU that doesn't drain an iPhone 5 size battery like water through a sieve. That means keeping one more CPU fabrication line in business beyond its intended life, taking that capacity away from the plants that are making silicon for the iPhone 11 and the coming 12. The camera would of course also have to be based on an earlier model, with all the same downsides again in terms of keeping old technology going and taking up factory capacity. And fitting all that into a 4/5 case would still be a much bigger engineering feat than the actual SE 2.

Bottom line: Even if you assume that the "iPhone Classic" market would be as big as that for the SE 2, it's hard to see how it would be worth Apple's time and money to cater to it. If you want to argue that the Classic would be a practical proposition for Apple, you would have to claim that the Classic market would be much bigger than the SE 2 - and given how popular the SE 2 is already turning out to be, that seems really unlikely.

Obviously it should be called C+=2.

Now that's taking social distancing seriously.

Collision attack: Find two different messages with the same hash.

[First] pre-image attack: Given a hash value, find a message with that hash.

Second pre-image attack: Given a message, find a different message with the same hash.

900 AD is the date that was taught in NZ schools for most of the 20th century, but these days it's considered much too early. Studies from various sources - archaeology, genetics, and careful analysis of Maori oral tradition - are largely in agreement now that the first Polynesian settlers arrived around 1250 AD, give or take a few decades.

Non-fiction I read this year:

Michael Benson - Space Odyssey - The detailed story of the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey. If you're a fan of the movie, or of Stanley Kubrick and/or Arthur C. Clarke in general, you should read this.

Atul Gawande - Complications - Fascinating look at life in the medical profession.

Christina Thompson - Sea People - Detailed, well-researched history of Polynesian-Western contact and relations. As a New Zealander I was interested in this, although American or European readers with no personal connection may be less so.

Peter Singer - Marx: A Very Short Introduction - What it says on the tin.

Robert C Allen - Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction - Also good, but inaccurately titled; it should have said "Global Economic History Since the Industrial Revolution".

Fraser A Sherman - Now and Then We Time Travel - A thorough if somewhat superficial survey of time travel in the movies.

Alec Nevala-Lee - Astounding - A history of the magazine Astounding Stories, and the four men most closely associated with it: John Campbell, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Ron Hubbard. Very thoroughly researched and annotated; it reveals a lot of new information and debunks a lot of old myths. (Whichever version of the "FBI visits Campbell to complain about A-bomb stories" you've heard, I can pretty much guarantee it wasn't the real one.)

Elizabeth Sandifer - Tardis Eruditorum 1: William Hartnell - The first volume of a thorough study of Doctor Who, with a combined fannish and scholarly point of view that I enjoyed.

Randall Munroe - How To - It's by Randall Munroe, what else do you need to know?

It’s amazing how much the output of Serious People pontificating about AI is coming to resemble that of the AIs themselves.

I keep wondering if the person who came up with the name was a Charlie Stross fan.

Stross's Laundry Files novels feature a hybrid magical/technological device codenamed Scorpion Stare. It's a weapon rather than a surveillance technology, but it's also built into government surveillance systems as a hidden feature. And the technology behind it was discovered by dissecting actual gorgons (which are a real thing in the Laundryverse).

What's the point of this? If you can't download something without knowing its hash in advance, then you can never download a new version of Chrome or anything else, so why do you care whether one is available?

The SEC isn't a lawmaking body; its job is to decide whether somebody is breaking the law as it stands. So there is no question of "before it was illegal" or ex post facto law here: the question is whether cryptocurrencies (or some subset of them that meet specific criteria) are breaking existing law. If the SEC takes this case (or any of several similar ones) to court and wins, that doesn't mean the cryptocurrencies involved have suddenly become illegal: it means they were illegal all along, it just took law enforcement a while to catch them.

There's no interaction with Gatekeeper there. An executable you've built yourself will just run normally (assuming it has the x attribute of course).

OK, quick lesson in how Gatekeeper works:

When you download a Mac app from the web, or save it from an email, a bit of metadata called the "quarantine attribute" is attached to it. When you try to run an app with the QA, Gatekeeper checks whether it's allowed to run; by default this will be allowed if it's signed. If it doesn't pass GK, you can still run it anyway by right-clicking on it and choosing "Open". When the app runs, regardless of whether GK passed it or you overrode GK, the QA is removed. After that GK no longer cares about it, and the app will just run normally without further fuss.

Safari and Apple Mail automatically add the QA to anything they download, and most 3rd party browsers and email clients now do the same. But if you download an app using most command line tools (curl, wget, ftp, scp, etc), or if you build it yourself from source, then the QA never gets attached to it in the first place, so GK doesn't care about it and the app just runs normally.

As far as I can tell the new notarization system doesn't change any of this, it just adds another form of code signing.

"Currently, if a user tries to run your software it simply won't run, and the user has to know to go into system settings and manually give it permission."

No, you don't need to go into system settings. Just right-click on the app and select "Open" from the context menu. This brings up an are-you-sure dialog that gives you the option to go ahead and run the app. If you choose to run it, Gatekeeper marks it as trusted and won't bother you about it next time.

“Oh my god! The engineers are revolting!”

“You’ve worked here all these years and you only just noticed that?”

What is life? A forkbomb implemented in hardware.

>What are journalists concerned with?

The fear that AI might learn to write journalism, or at least clickbait, better than they do :)

Composition determines density. A rocky planet would block less light than a gas giant planet of the same mass, because it would be denser and therefore smaller.

It's regularly detecting exoplanets down to slightly less than Earth-sized now, so assuming the orbits happened to be aligned the right way to make transits detectable at all, it should be able to detect all the planets except Mercury and Mars. Our hypothetical alien astronomers would put us down as a six-planet system, possibly worth a paper or two and a page in Alien Wikipedia :)

For a moment there I thought McAfee must be starting a new cryptocurrency called the Crypto Shilling (accompanied of course by the Crypto Penny and the Crypto Pound).

"I'd guess that this is more due to the popularity of GitHub among potential contributiors to these projects."

Doesn't that support bmsleight's point? If Github is more popular than NotGithub, even among the developers of NotGithub, that doesn't exactly inspire confidence in NotGithub.

"You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform..." https://qntm.org/calendar

Breaking Bad/Twin Peaks crossover confirmed.

"Strong bayesian priors" is just another way of saying "high-redundancy signal".

Well, I don't think the article was really aimed at actual cranks (who are, more or less by definition, immune to this kind of advice). It feels more aimed at scientists, or people of a scientific turn of mind, who may have found a genuine flaw in some widely accepted result but might not have the communication skills to get it across to the scientific community.

If you're on a Mac, just open the PDF in Preview and then Save As to a different file name. This gives you a PDF visually identical to the original (with TOC, selectable text, etc) but with no protection.

I got 4/5 (background: C++/C# programmer who sometimes works with SQL queries). The one I got wrong was the first one; I thought the query optimizer would be smart enough to spot that the date function could be turned into a range query, but apparently not.

It's interesting to compare this with the 4th question, which more or less does exactly the same thing only with text instead of dates. They both have a WHERE clause that superficially tests the result of a function call but can be easily transformed into a simple range check on an indexed column. I don't know why the optimizer seems to be able to handle one case but not the other.

There's a promoted comment on the original post that addresses the question of interference between lidars from multiple cars on the same street (short version: coded pulses so each unit can recognise its own reflections). But your comment makes me wonder about another issue: what about eye safety in a street crowded with autonomous cars? Each car's lidar may be eye safe on its own, but how safe is a busy street that's being continually scanned by dozens of cars at once?

Same for me. Maybe something changed about HN since the demo was written?

This sort of thing is why Swift treats grapheme clusters, rather than code points or bytes or "characters", as the fundamental unit of text. When I first started learning Swift I thought that was a weird choice that would just get in the way, but these days I'm coming around to their way of thinking.

Doctorow mentions the cases where a printer company has made their software lie about how much ink was left in a cartridge to make consumers replace them more often. I always wondered why a manufacturer would want to do that. I mean, I understand the motive of making consumers buy ink more often, but from the manufacturer's point of view, why would they want to throw perfectly good ink away? Colour ink isn't as expensive to manufacture as they like to claim but it's still worth something. Why didn't they just put less ink in the cartridge to begin with (and maybe lie about how much was in it), instead of lying about how much was left toward the end of its life and throwing ink away?