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Java's new Z Garbage Collector (ZGC) is very exciting

Java 11 features a new Garbage Collector, the Z Garbage Collector (ZGC), which is designed for very low pause times on huge multi-terabyte heaps. In this article we'll cover the motivation for a new GC, a technical overview and some of the really exciting possibilities ZGC opens up.

Click to view the original at opsian.com

Hasnain says:

“So how does it perform? Stefan Karlsson and Per Liden gave some preliminary numbers at their Jfokus talk earlier this year. ZGC’s SPECjbb 2015 throughput numbers are roughly comparable with the Parallel GC (which optimises for throughput) but with an average pause time of 1ms and a max of 4ms. This is in contrast to G1 and Parallel who had average pause times in excess of 200ms.”

Posted on 2018-08-31T05:29:26+0000

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Linux Kernel Developer Criticizes Intel for Meltdown, Spectre Response

At the Open Source Summit North America, Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman took issue with Intel's initial disclosure of the Meltdown and Spectre CPU vulnerabilities.

Click to view the original at eweek.com

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Two Cops Said They Saw A Man Grope Women. The Women Disagreed. The DA Charged Him Anyway

An 11-month prosecution of a ‘forcible touching’ case sharply diverges from the office’s treatment of Harvey Weinstein, defense attorneys say.

Click to view the original at theappeal.org

Hasnain says:

“Jocelyn Simonson, an associate professor at Brooklyn Law School, told The Appeal: “The discrepancy between the two cases reveals the presumption of truth-telling given to police officers, where in parallel circumstances a complainant is not necessarily believed; and the presumption of innocence given to more privileged, well-resourced defendants, whereas a less privileged person who is arrested on police officer testimony alone is often presumed guilty.”

Posted on 2018-08-29T20:19:00+0000

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To Get All the World’s Muslims to Hajj, It Would Take at Least 581 Years

Because of yearly caps, it would be impossible for Islam’s 1.8 billion worshipers to all make the pilgrimage to Mecca, a once-in-a-lifetime obligation.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

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The Peter Principle is a joke taken seriously. Is it true?

There are a lot of idiots around — just look at the front benches of the House of Commons. But why do the idiots reach such elevated positions? Many onlookers feel sure that the successors to David…

Click to view the original at timharford.com

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John McCain, War Hero, Senator, Presidential Contender, Dies at 81

A naval aviator who endured torture in Vietnam, Mr. McCain rose to the heights of power in Washington until cancer felled him.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

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Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound | Maryanne Wolf

When the reading brain skims texts, we don’t have time to grasp complexity, to understand another’s feelings or to perceive beauty. We need a new literacy for the digital age writes Maryanne Wolf, author of Reader, Come Home

Click to view the original at theguardian.com

Hasnain says:

“The possibility that critical analysis, empathy and other deep reading processes could become the unintended “collateral damage” of our digital culture is not a simple binary issue about print vs digital reading. It is about how we all have begun to read on any medium and how that changes not only what we read, but also the purposes for why we read. Nor is it only about the young. The subtle atrophy of critical analysis and empathy affects us all. It affects our ability to navigate a constant bombardment of information. It incentivizes a retreat to the most familiar silos of unchecked information, which require and receive no analysis, leaving us susceptible to false information and demagoguery.”

Posted on 2018-08-25T20:42:07+0000

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‘U.S. Workers Only’: Companies Hesitate to Hire Foreign M.B.A. Students

For years, coming to America for business school was a reliable way for many international students to land jobs at big U.S. companies. Tougher worker-visa rules are changing those odds.

Click to view the original at wsj.com

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H-1B visa-reliant Cisco ‘secured visas for foreign workers instead of hiring U.S. citizens’: report

Cisco denies paying visa holders less but fails to address claim that it favored foreign workers over Americans.

Click to view the original at mercurynews.com

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Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A – Chick-fil-A Tech Blog – Medium

by Brian Chambers, Caleb Hurd, Sean Drucker, Alex Crane, Morgan McEntire, Jamie Roberts, and Laura Jauch (the Chick-fil-A IOT/Edge team)

Click to view the original at medium.com

Hasnain says:

TIL Chick Fil-A has some serious cloud computing chops with Kowbernetes - and they do real time demand forecasting.

This is some super impressive stuff and with some quotes right on the money about focusing on business impact:

“Research says that using the latest and greatest technology (like Kubernetes) has no correlation to a team or organization’s success. None. The ability to turn ideas into code and get code into production rapidly does.”

Posted on 2018-08-23T05:13:22+0000

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A web application completely in Rust – Sascha Grunert – Medium

My latest software architectural experiment is to write a complete real-world web application in Rust with as less as boilerplate as…

Click to view the original at medium.com

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Hasnain says:

This was a really interesting read. The blurb is a bit clickbaity but I learnt a lot about history, art, and chinese culture.

Posted on 2018-08-20T00:34:15+0000

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Why a patient paid a $285 copay for a $40 drug

Insurance copays are higher than the cost of the drug about 25 percent of the time, according to a study published in March by the University of Southern California’s Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics.

Click to view the original at pbs.org

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How “Crazy Rich” Asians Have Led to the Largest Income Gap in the U.S.

“Crazy Rich Asians” offers an extreme example of prosperity, but a study shows that Asian-Americans are the most economically divided racial group in the United States.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

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Why is San Francisco ... covered in human feces? | Nathan Robinson

People aren’t pooping on the streets because they unlearned basic hygiene. Rather, the incidents reflect shameful levels of inequality in the city

Click to view the original at theguardian.com

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Making $25k/month Selling Chocolate Dicks

Adam is the founder of Dick At Your Door, an e-commerce shop for prank chocolate dicks. What started as a joke quickly became a viable business with real opportunity. Getting viral on social networks and news platforms, turned the eCommerce into a $25k/month business.

Click to view the original at failory.com

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The Impossible Expensiveness of American Life – Eudaimonia and Co

What My Daily Grocery Shopping in London vs the States Says About American Precarity

Click to view the original at eand.co

Hasnain says:

"Americans think, proudly, that they pay less in taxes — but the impossibly higher price of food alone chews those illusory savings up long before we even get to healthcare, education, finance, or transportation. Americans don’t know how bad they have it. And the reverse, I think, is true, too. Europeans don’t know how good they have it, either."

Posted on 2018-08-18T21:05:15+0000

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Georgia Police Dept. Defends Use of Taser on 87-Year-Old Woman Cutting Dandelions

The woman, Martha Bishara, was cutting the plants with a knife when officers asked her to drop it. Her family said she speaks very little English.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

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'F--- You!': Press leaks during Google's all-hands meeting enrage insiders and break a cardinal rule at the company

During a meeting between Google's top managers and employees to discuss the company's plans for China, many were shocked to learn someone inside Google was feeding real-time information to reporters. Suddenly, press leaks became the No. 1 issue.

Click to view the original at businessinsider.com

Hasnain says:

“The person or people who shared the information with The Times gave Pichai and Brin an excuse to stop discussing anything substantive about China at the meeting, said the sources, two of whom strongly oppose the building of a censored search engine by Google. What's more, the executives were made to look like victims of a breach of trust, the sources said.”

Made to look like? Really?!

Posted on 2018-08-18T03:51:01+0000

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24-core CPU and I can’t type an email (part one)

I wasn’t looking for trouble. I wasn’t trying to build Chrome a thousand times in a weekend, I was just engaging in that most mundane of 21st century tasks, writing an email at 10:30 am. And sudden…

Click to view the original at randomascii.wordpress.com

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Surprise Gift: Free Tuition for All N.Y.U. Medical Students

A plan will cover the $55,000 annual tuition for every current and future New York University School of Medicine student, regardless of financial need.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

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MIT mathematicians solve age-old spaghetti mystery

It’s nearly impossible to break a dry spaghetti noodle into only two pieces. A new MIT study shows how and why it can be done.

Click to view the original at news.mit.edu

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An inversion of nature: how air conditioning created the modern city

The shopping mall, the office block, suburbs, museums, Hollywood, the Gulf cities – air conditioning powered them all. But has the time come to turn it off?

Click to view the original at theguardian.com

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Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle.

If my nephew’s ideas on immigration had been in force a century ago, our family would have been wiped out.

Click to view the original at politico.com

Hasnain says:

"Before Donald Trump had started his political ascent promulgating the false story that Barack Obama was a foreign-born Muslim, while my nephew, Stephen, was famously recovering from the hardships of his high school cafeteria in Santa Monica, Joseph was a child on his own in Sudan in fear of being deported back to Eritrea to face execution for desertion."

Powerful writing

Posted on 2018-08-13T14:00:41+0000

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Hasnain says:

So this (one reason why) MoviePass is why they’re going bankrupt - people using it to take a shit because there aren’t any decent public bathrooms

Posted on 2018-08-13T04:56:13+0000

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In a Town of 11 People, Mysterious Disappearance Turns Neighbor Against Neighbor

Rumors abound in a small town in the Australian outback. Was Paddy Moriarty fed to a pet crocodile? Or could he have been baked into a meat pie?

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

Hasnain says:

“Local authorities said they are so reliant on the residents to solve the case that they held the inquest much earlier than they normally do in part because most of the residents are in their 70s and might not have years to wait.”

Posted on 2018-08-13T03:15:17+0000

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Hasnain says:

“At this point, Elizabeth Bruch, a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan, crashes in to your thought process (and this news article). Yep, she says. Leagues do seem to exist. But you’re not alone in trying to escape yours: “Three-quarters, or more, of people are dating aspirationally,” she says. And according to a new study, users of online-dating sites spend most of their time trying to contact people “out of their league.””

Can confirm/relate since Mehreen is way out of my league

Posted on 2018-08-13T03:08:10+0000

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The daunting aftermath of releasing your dream game, as told by the devs of Stardew Valley, Owlboy, and more

For devs like Iconoclasts' Joakim Sandberg, releasing a game after working on it for eight years can be a thrill that quickly gives way to emptiness and anxiety.

Click to view the original at pcgamer.com

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Secret DMV office near California Capitol serves lawmakers and their staff

The California Department of Motor Vehicles has a secret office in the Legislative Office Building in downtown Sacramento where elected officials and their staff can request appointments to renew their vehicle registration or apply for Real ID.

Click to view the original at sacbee.com

Hasnain says:

“On Wednesday, Democratic lawmakers, at the urging of Gov. Jerry Brown, rejected an audit into the DMV’s handling of growing wait times for customers. Assemblyman Jim Patterson, a Fresno Republican who requested the audit, said “members of the Legislature have to practice staying in touch” with regular Californians.”

Posted on 2018-08-12T06:43:34+0000

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The Marketing Message That Works with Republicans but Not Democrats

Research finds that consumer attitudes about luxury products are shaped by their views on hierarchy.

Click to view the original at hbr.org

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The New Housing Crisis: Shut Out Of The Market

Ten years after a housing collapse during the Great Recession, home values have rebounded but there are too few homes on the market. Buyers face intense competition, and that means higher prices.

Click to view the original at npr.org

Hasnain says:

"Many potential buyers reach a breaking point where they finally resign themselves to renting long-term or moving out of the area."

Posted on 2018-08-08T01:09:48+0000

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Remote code execution in Apple's packet-mangler (CVE-2017-13904, CVE-2018-4249)

The packet-mangler component of Apple's macOS operating system kernel contained a remote code execution vulnerability which could be triggered by sending a malicious network packet to the Mac over the internet. This post explains how it we found it using QL.

Click to view the original at lgtm.com

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Modern SAT solvers: fast, neat and underused (part 1 of N)

Before I started doing research, I saw SAT solvers as academically interesting but without practical uses ouside of other academic applications. I've since then changed my mind, and I want to change yours, because modern SAT solvers are neat, fast and almost criminally underused by the industry.

Click to view the original at codingnest.com

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Andrew Sullivan: When Racism Is Fit to Print

The left defended New York Times hire Sarah Jeong’s tweets attacking white people because in their worldview, anti-white bigotry simply can’t exist.

Click to view the original at nymag.com

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A Japanese medical university lowered women's test scores because it was a "necessary evil"

The scores were rigged so that no more than 30% of the successful candidates would be women.

Click to view the original at qz.com

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Hasnain says:

"America: a country where pro-life actually means pro-blastula, pro-embryo, and pro-fetus, not pro-baby. You know what pro-life policies actually look like? Universal health care, so all women could afford prenatal doctor visits and the birth itself; paid maternity and paternity leaves, to allow parents to actually care for a living baby without emptying their bank accounts; subsidized daycare, so parents could go to work without paying all or most of their income to private babysitters; and a school day that hews closer to the workday, not to some outmoded agrarian schedule designed to get kids home in time to harvest crops."

Posted on 2018-08-03T14:31:50+0000

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Pakistan: Adventure travel's best-kept secret?

Are you looking for the ultimate in adventure travel? Then look to Pakistan. This surprising destination has "mountain scenery that is beyond anyone's wildest imagination," says the British Backpacker Society.

Click to view the original at cnn.com

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How we scaled nginx and saved the world 54 years every day

10 million websites, apps and APIs use Cloudflare to give their users a speed boost. At peak we serve more than 10 million requests a second across our 151 data centers. Over the years we’ve made many modifications to our version of NGINX to handle our growth. This is blog post is about one of the...

Click to view the original at blog.cloudflare.com

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Teenager Finds Classical Alternative to Quantum Recommendation Algorithm | Quanta Magazine

18-year-old Ewin Tang has proven that classical computers can solve the “recommendation problem” nearly as fast as quantum computers. The result eliminates one

Click to view the original at quantamagazine.org

Hasnain says:

Cue impostor syndrome in...

“For quantum computing, Tang’s result is a setback. Or not. Tang has eliminated one of the clearest, best examples of a quantum advantage. At the same time, Tang’s paper is further evidence of the fruitful interplay between the study of quantum and classical algorithms.”

Posted on 2018-08-01T16:37:19+0000