Prosecutors in PG&E case abruptly reduce potential fines
Abruptly and without explanation, federal prosecutors slashed potential criminal penalties for Pacific Gas and Electric Co. from $562 million to $6 million Tuesday while a jury was considering whether the company violated safety laws both before and after the lethal 2010 gas pipeline explosion in Sa...
We just got even weirder results about the 'alien megastructure' star
Last year , the world freaked out over the discovery of a star that was dimming and flickering so erratically, it couldn't be explained by any known natural phenomenon - prompting one scientist to actually go there and suggest it could be evidence...
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Posted on 2016-08-10T05:35:15+0000
An entire generation of a city’s lawyers was killed in Pakistan
The attack on Monday leaves Baluchistan lawless in more ways than one.
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Posted on 2016-08-10T00:31:54+0000
The most deadly Isis attack in weeks is the one the world probably cares about least
Both Isis and a faction of the Pakistani Taliban have claimed responsibility for a suicide attack on a hospital in Quetta which killed at least 70 people and wounded more than 100.
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Posted on 2016-08-09T15:12:14+0000
Why do CPUs have multiple cache levels?
This is a reader question from “jlforrest” that seems worth answering in more detail than just a single sentence: I understand the need for a cache but I don’t understand why there are …
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Posted on 2016-08-09T04:57:13+0000
Why bad ideas refuse to die | Steven Poole
The Long Read: They may have been disproved by science or dismissed as ridiculous, but some foolish beliefs endure. In theory they should wither away – but it’s not that simple
Hasnain says:
Such a good read on bad ideas, anti intellectualism, research, science, conspiracies, and human thought processes.
"The resurgence of flat-Earth theory has also spawned many web pages that employ mathematics, science, and everyday experience to explain why the world actually is round. This is a boon for public education. And we should not give in to the temptation to conclude that belief in a conspiracy is prima facie evidence of stupidity. Evidently, conspiracies really happen. Members of al-Qaida really did conspire in secret to fly planes into the World Trade Center. And, as Edward Snowden revealed, the American and British intelligence services really did conspire in secret to intercept the electronic communications of millions of ordinary citizens. Perhaps the most colourful official conspiracy that we now know of happened in China. When the half-millennium-old Tiananmen Gate was found to be falling down in the 1960s, it was secretly replaced, bit by bit, with an exact replica, in a successful conspiracy that involved nearly 3,000 people who managed to keep it a secret for years."
Posted on 2016-08-08T00:17:53+0000
FTC to Crack Down on Paid Celebrity Posts That Aren’t Clear Ads
The agency says brands and the social media stars who promote their products need to be more transparent about sponsored content
Notes on concurrency bugs
Do concurrency bugs matter? From the literature, we know that most reported bugs in distributed systems have really simple causes and can be caught by trivial tests, even when we only look at bugs that cause really bad failures, like loss of a cluster or data corruption. The filesystem literature ec...
Hasnain says:
"For example, the idea inside clang’s TSan, using “happens-before” to find data races, goes back ages. There’s a 2003 paper that discusses “combining two previously known race detection techniques – lockset-based detection and happens-before-based detection – to obtain fewer false positives than lockset-based detection alone”. That’s actually what TSan v1 did, but with TSan v2 they realized the tool would be more impactful if they only used happens-before because that avoids false positives, which means that people will actually use the tool. That’s not something that’s likely to turn into a paper that gets cited zillions of times, though. For anyone who’s looked at how afl works, this story should sound familiar. AFL is emintently practical and has had a very large impact in the real world, mostly by eschewing fancy techniques from the recent literature."
Posted on 2016-08-07T05:53:37+0000
Minds turned to ash
Is burnout simply the result of working too hard? Josh Cohen argues that the root of the problem lies deeper than that
Hasnain says:
Pretty good essay on burnout
"“You know”, he said to me one day, “it’s not like I want to be this pathetic loser. I want to get up tomorrow, get back in the gym, find a new job, see people again. But it’s like even as I say I’m gonna do all this, some voice in me says, ‘no I’m not, no way am I doing that.’ And then I can’t work out if I feel depressed or relieved, and the confusion sends me crazy.”"
Posted on 2016-08-07T05:39:28+0000
Concurrency Freaks: Throughput vs Latency and Lock-Free vs Wait-Free
concurrencyfreaks.blogspot.com
Click to view the original at concurrencyfreaks.blogspot.com
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Posted on 2016-08-07T05:31:04+0000