skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For those using the traditional DOS-style approach, there has never been a reason or need for any Dell-supplied Windows apps which can compromise the firmware, even upon reboot. Allowing only the local manual console operator to do the deed, and only when NOT booted to Windows or Linux always gave an extra layer of security by comparison.

Now we know the Windows way was far less secure than we thought, although it did seem like an obvious security compromise when they first started trying to update BIOS from Vista in addition to the DOS way.

Dell has traditionally provided BIOS firmware updates primarily in DOS-executable .EXE form, with additional Windows apps or Dell Update Package approaches becoming available over the decades as the functional reliability was thought to be almost comparable when attempting to replace the ROM file from Windows.

The most reliable way to update your firmware has always been to turn off the PC, disconnect the HDD or SSD, then boot to DOS using a floppy, CD, or USB device which contains the flashing program and the ROM file. Run the BIOS flash program from the DOS command line like usual.

The equivalent on UEFI motherboards is to boot to the UEFI Shell itself, which if built-in may just come up by default if no drives are connected. Otherwise you will need to supply your own Shell64.efi on a storage medium in a recognized filesystem like FAT32 which UEFI is required to read from.

In shell64.efi you will be in a DOS-like command line then you run the vendor-supplied UEFI-executable .EFI program also on your storage media, which then applies the updated ROM file just like it would in DOS. But no operating system needed or wanted, not even DOS any more.

Dell example option 1.3.1:

https://qrl.dell.com/Files/en-us/Html/Workstations/DellPreci...

Other motherboards have had a built-in flash routine for some time now, where it recognizes a proper ROM file on a FAT32-formatted USB drive, and you can flash it with no OS necessary either.

Also, the FreeDOS approach is just the DOS that is used for distribution to avoid copyright issues. Most of the updates distributed with a FreeDOS platform were usually developed & tested using MS-DOS, and you may have better luck burning the FreeDOS version to floppy, CD, or USB, then copying the vendor executables & files to equivalent MS-DOS-booting media rather than the supplied FreeDOS-booting approach.
That’s a rather unfortunate typo you have there.
Five Investing Powers
"We thus carried on a statistical analysis based on historical data on Popes and on male Italian artists who lived between 1200 and 1900. We choose the 13th to 19th century period because the 13th century marks the beginning of artistical activity and the 19th century roughly marks the end of the pre-antibiotic era. [...] We found and analysed relevant information on 80 out of 81 Popes (the date of birth of Celestino IV is unknown) elected between 1200 and who died as of 1900 (actually, 1903 —when Pope Leone XIII died), and on 426 male artists selected according to the above mentioned criteria.

Between 1200–1599 and 1600–1900, the median age of Popes at starting pontificate increased from 60.0 to 65.5 years, while the median duration of pontificate raised from 6.5 to 11.0 years, respectively. The median age at death of both groups increased in the study period, from 66 to 77 years for Popes, and from 63 to 70 years for artists."
Mintue Page Profit
Enterprise Agreement accounts aren’t billed on demand, so there’s little use for that in accounts spending a lot of money.
Are the savings from not hiring assistants being passed on to rank-and-file employees via salary or distributed to shareholders and the C-suite? An employee's salary doesn't magically go up because their burdened rate goes down.

Let's also not forget the fact that if you're in contracting/consulting it's more lucrative for you to charge the customer for a technical person's expensive time spent on administrivia than it is to hire additional labor and bill them for "the help".
When I get stuck on a problem, or am switching the module I’m developing, I’ll often take a couple of hours, and watch something on the tube.

When I get back to the task, I tend to get it completed in no time at all, or solve the problem quickly.

I will sometimes, take the rest of the day off. I did that today. I’m starting work on a fairly significant feature that will touch almost every layer of code, and I can’t afford to pooch it.
Actually, Log-Cauchy?
> You have to read huge manuals to know how to "only give access to s3" through a key

I have to disagree with this. It really is pretty straight forward.[0]

[0] - https://objectivefs.com/howto/how-to-restrict-s3-bucket-poli...
You - "one of the senior management team said white supremacy does not exist"

article - "he questioned the existence of white supremacy at the company"

Not the same
Is this by chance open source?
The feature I most want from AWS is a simple way to create credentials that are only allowed to read from or write to a specific S3 bucket.

The way you do this at the moment genuinely involves copying and pasting JSON policy documents around! It's horrific.

I want this for myself, but more importantly I want it for users of software that I write. I would love to be able to build something that stores a user's data in an S3 bucket that they own (and are billed for directly) - but it's currently just too difficult to talk them through setting up the bucket and creating the right credentials for it.
I got it to work with the following but errored out on openssl so I couldn't install pip.
It builds fine with docker fedora 32. Thank you.
Platform
Fedora 32, Docker on Windows 10, Version 2004

Steps to Reproduce
Install docker from docker.com

docker run -t -i fedora:32 bash
git clone https://github.com/facebookincubator/cinder.git
yum install zlib-devel openssl-devel
./configure
make
make altinstall

This error is occurs when you do ./configure --enable-optimizations this version of python complies it either way.

>> Objects/accu.o
Parser/listnode.c: In function ‘list1node’:
Parser/listnode.c:66:1: error: ‘/cinder/Parser/listnode.gcda’ profile count data file not
found [-Werror=missing-profile]
66 | }
| ^

If you get this error it is because you used --enable-optimizations.

github.com/brianherman
https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-herman-092919208/

Edit: Removing github flavored markdown
Edit: Answering own question
Edit: More formatting
I used to use hyperterminal as a child to transfer if we didn't both have unlimited hour ISP access.
I don't understand why there isn't at least a setting that says "turn everything off if I hit $x."

Then just given people a certain grace period to reactivate or get their data out before it's removed.

It wouldn't fix production deployments where you want alarms, not a shutdown, when you hit spending caps, but it would help people on the dev stage to avoid issues like this.
> it also makes me face the reality that I would not want to work with many of the people that resigned

I totally get it. Toxic people tend to clump. And they eventually aim their toxicity at each other. You don't want them in the workplace or really, in your life at all.

> Resigning over a random employee refusing to say that "white supremacy exists" is absurd.

Not only is it absurd, the whole demand to say such a thing was a Kafka trap to begin with.

> I realize that my lack of political fervor is a liability. I wish I cared more about these things, I really do, but I don't.

It's not a liability, at least not in the long term. The time when being 'woke' is beneficial to advancement will come to an end. Because if the fervor one has for politics is what a company values, then they'll get increasing fervor until the place is too toxic to be productive.

Your inability to generate a constant stream of passion for your opinions and hate for contrary opinions is a sign that you are normal. That you are reasonable. And that you are dependable. It's nothing at all to apologize for.

There will always be companies that have employees with different political, religious, and social opinions who will find common ground in their desire to build cool shit and provide value. Go find one of those places and be happy.
At one point I had a "balance" of over 2 million dogecoin with one of those pools that never paid out. I actually did mine about 0.5 million that i got to spend on steam tokens a couple years later.

based on my past history, expect 3d printing to be a big deal sometime around 2028, finally.
Do you really even own it, if it can be remotely disabled by the manufacturer?
You can get alerts. And there are some limits for young accounts. But they really need a "beginner" mode. Or a budget mode, put $x on the account can't spend more. But I guess they are making a lot of money with "mistakes" so there may not be kuch incentives
@dang, cleanup on ilse flamewar
Allegedly it's because local rulers were playing carrom, and were betting villages.

Once Britishers came, Bengal was separated from the rest of India along their borders of their territories.
I think based on other discussions in the thread, that just pulling out definitions will not be so helpful, so I just want to directly inquire, what sort of problem (since there is obviously a problem with this) do you think causes things like the "war on terror" and "war on drugs"? Do you think that these sorts of political actions would be acceptable to the voting public if they only affected white people?
"we have learned that building computers that rival human brains is not just a question of computational power and clever code."

It might be. We don't know that yet.
When I read about the myriad predatory practices of Amazon I think about who the predator is and the saying "the fish rots from the head." I'm looking forward to the day Jeff Bezos pays the price for being the predator that he is.
It’s not the same. Depends on total shares.

No one likes messing with stuff that’s never gonna move, doesn’t matter if it’s $1 of $100, it might as well not even be an investment opportunity.

The returns on these high priced and low volume stocks will always be shit.
Guide to Launching a New Product
Yes, a useful last resort safeguard would need to be more granular than just "turn everything off", at least if we're talking about protecting production systems rather than just people learning and wanting to avoid inadvertently leaving the free tier or something like that.

Still, it's not hard to imagine some simple refinements that might be practical. For example, an option to preserve data in DB or other storage services but stop all other activity might be a useful safety net for a lot of AWS customers. It wouldn't cut costs to 0, but that's not necessarily the optimal outcome for customers running in production anyway. It would probably mitigate the greatest risks of runaway costs, though.
These politicians and businesspeople are also doing things they’d do as a hobby. They’re talking to tons of people, organizing things and getting things done. They’re doing extrovert things. Not my preference but de gustibus non est disputandum.
You don't seem to be completely across the issue.

If it was purely about talking about politics at work then everyone wouldn't have resigned.
Audacity to be bought and brought under Muse Group
Cilibrasi's "Statistical Inference through Data Compression" is pretty cool. One nice application was using compression to infer the mutual-information between DNA from different animals, and using that to construct evolutionary trees.

Edit: I see your arxiv link is to the same thing (although I have a hard-copy of the book based on their thesis, so didn't spot it immediately)
Exactly. The whole “rarity” of NFTs is laughingly absurd. The idea of scarcity of digital artifacts was always a joke, and was dramatically disproved more than 20 years ago.
Nice, thanks! Scrubber is what I use now, and it's great. Can't wait to see the geometric plugins.
A remarkably high % of the posts on https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/ are about land issues, and as usual, the smaller stakes, the bigger the conflict.

This is probably my favorite story to date of how a squabble over where to temporarily store some cut lumber escalated:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProRevenge/comments/djci7p/how_i_go...

Be sure to read all 4 parts!
Fakedy fake phone numbers for phone verification
I've stayed away from AWS for these reasons. Instead I use systems on top of AWS, like Vercel etc.

Is it ironic that Amazon's mantra is to be "Customer obsessed" yet AWS is so magnificently confusing for anyone not doing it full-time?

As a designer I've used plenty of Digital Ocean, Vercel, Cloudflare Workers and other static hosts without a problem... I've never been able to figure out how to even start on AWS, and all these horror stories constantly make sure I stay away
I’m not trying to be snarky here, would like an honest opinion: how do they win on UX? Are there specific things you like there?

I’ve used all three major clouds in production now and I dread using the AWS console. Or really any part of it, over Azure or GCP.

I’ve always thought of them as purely winning the “nobody got fired for…” mindshare thing despite having a thoroughly mediocre product.
Respectfully, I disagree. There's no onus here at all, on either side—this isn't some intellectual debate with formal rules, this is a struggle to make marginalized voices heard.

Effective communication is nowhere near the same as using transparent / effortless language. "The medium is the message"—phrases like "defund the police" and "Black Lives Matter" arrest the attention in ways that "we should reconsider the financial resources allocated to law enforcement" and "I value the lives of Black Americans as equal to those of White Americans and, moreover, those Black lives have historically been undervalued and oppressed" simply do not (and I can't even make a claim that that's what those phrases mean—you'd have to ask someone, and try to understand what they meant).

The effectiveness of communication is nontrivial. There's a reason for the long history of poetry as a way to communicate emotions, a way that tends to transcend the effectiveness of plain language to convey intense emotion in an intuitive form; and that reason is decidedly not that artful use of language removes ambiguity.

Ambiguity highlights precisely the points at which we fail to understand one another, and point to the most critical opportunities to clarify what we mean to each other.
Thank you. Oh for sure. (for people not familiar) So we took Highrise over a bit after that announcement, and that was almost an impossible thing to overcome. It was hemorrhaging customers. It was always a turnaround project. Our biggest task for the first couple years was just trying to erase the "marketing" that we had shut down already.
> So, to fully comply w/o risking losing customer data, AWS will have to stop charging for not running instances and inactive EBS volumes which most definitely bring on many kinds of abuse.

Another option would be to "reserve" them in the budget. That is, when for instance you create a 10 GB EBS volume, count it in the budget as if it will be kept for the whole month (and all months after that). Yes, that would mean an EBS volume costing $X per day would count in the budget as 31*$X, but it would prevent both going over the limit and having to lose data.
Python has a lot of crazy metaprogramming capabilities. Ability to inspect stacks, override import, and more...

The ones they removed are not commonly used at all.
Do you think lower income people have less sex?
The discussion of the "funny names" list including the pyramid of hate discussion was what led to the "no politics" rule - it didn't happen in violation of it.
> Children understand that calling people names isn't the same as violence.

This isn't the argument actually being made here, so if that's what DHH thought when he shut the thread down then that might explain part of the outcry.

The argument is simply that the behavior everyone claims to decry (e.g. racial violence) starts somewhere, far below violence. "Funny names" turn into off-color jokes. Off-color jokes turn into jokes with a darker edge. Then it turns into "just asking questions", and before too long your organization is acting as much as a group radicalization effort as it is a business.

This still isn't "cause and effect", where anyone who chuckles at a funny name is fated to be building the next Stormfront unless stopped by an intrepid band of culture warriors. But we've known since Ben Franklin that an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure, so under the 'pyramid of hate' argument, a company trying to foster a safe workplace for all workers should strive to keep potential racism from turning into a problem by enforcing standards of workplace conduct that don't wait for actual racism.

Just like we build secure software by building security in early into the release process.

Just like we build functional and well-integrated software by building the testing early into the release process.

Just like we avoid pest infestation by keeping the food off of the tables and floors. On and on it goes.

The standard we walk past is the standard we accept. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRQBtDtZTGA
> Instead of starting with "no access" then adding atomized access you have to understand this extremely complex "json privilege system". Instead of just programming, this is the only allowed IP, the is the only allowed bucket, this is the only allowed service, ...

What would that look like if it’s not going to be a series of access permissions and filters represented as JSON?

Security is never a simple checkbox and complaints like this about it needing to be simpler need to be backed up with an alternative. I genuinely wonder what alternative there is to the current permissions model.

It’s incredibly expressive and doesn’t take that long to understand. People who cannot master it would likely leave some other side door open anyway.

> ... and my max is 200usd, or something to that effect.

This has been a valid complaint for years. Though to solve it you need to answer what happens to legit resources when your billing cap is reached. Do all your ephemeral serves turn off? Do your EBs volumes all her deleted? Do your S3 objects all disappear?
Agreed. It’s multitasking when you switch between tasks before reaching a natural stopping point.
Well, the website is currently being down / DNS-squatted. I read the FAQ through the wayback machine[1], and it doesn't make an argument beyond cybercrime. I don't care enough about stopping cybercrime to stop using email. And I think most of the world feels the same way. Email is simply too useful.

And if the proposal is to replace it with someone non-federated, no thanks. I'd rather use a federated protocol with spam and phishing emails than use a tangled mess of centralized services, each with their own accounts and governance.

Being able to email anyone in the world from the comfort of my inbox is precious. I'm not giving that up for the dubious promise of less cybercrime. No way.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210331145351/https://mnmnotmai...

https://web.archive.org/web/20210227095626/https://mnmnotmai...
That's because there is a strategic difference between talking about inequality and making fun of someone for having a name that's different than yours. One has an upside, the other doesn't.
A breakup sans marriage is still going to be devastating. At minimum, how do you decide who gets what, without some sort of legal framework around it?

What if you end up in the hospital, unconscious? Who makes care decisions for you? Sure, we can have a legal framework just for that, but that's just one more thing you have to do. What if you die? Who gets your stuff? Sure, you should have written up a will, but many people haven't done it. More overhead.

Something to consider is how long homosexual communities have fought for marriage equality. Yes, part of it is certainly symbolic, but I've spoken to gay/lesbian friends who (when they couldn't get married) were anxious all the time about not having the legal benefits around marriage.

I think it'd be possible to not have legal marriage anymore, but you'd still have to have a bunch of legal constructs around the idea of being partnered to someone in order for many life things to work properly. Whether or not that would be better or worse is certainly up for debate.
Slavery is still legal if you're incarcerated, and last I checked, we led the world in absolute and proportional numbers of people incarcerated.
The invoices on the billing page break down where the charges came from. If you download the pdf version, it has even more details.
> presumably[1] with an agreement that limits data sharing

I have worked for both a municipal government and school boards. The difference in attitudes is astonishing. At the government level, the agreement is not enough. Confidential data, including personal information, must be hosted on servers within the country in order to ensure the data cannot be accessed by a third party without legal recourse. For school boards, an agreement suffices.
I think the company will be better off with the 30% gone. They can regroup. Calling it a racist company because some of the head guys are republican that don't see white supremacists every time they see a white person walking down the street is idiocy. Both sides of the fence have turn to zealotry rather than finding common ground. Let the 30% go form their on basecamp rival that is focused on promoting the idea that all white people are racists by their very nature and see how far it goes. Getting politics out of the company sounds good to me. I don't care about your color or your issues, I just want coworkers I can depend on and get along with and don't wear their politics on their sleeves or feel they're owed a special privilege because of their skin color rather than what they bring to the team.
no place seems immune from this nowadays... it only seems to differ in degrees.
"They already win on UX"

As someone that has tried and failed to get some small personal sites running on AWS a couple times, I'm going to have to tag this snippet with [citation needed].
I do understand that, but there are services that are still billed for when ‘spun down’. To stop getting the bills they have to be terminated.

The solution seems to be to implement ‘emergency stop’ when whole account is put to pause but no state is purged. And then you’ll probably have a week or two to react and decide if you want larger bill, salvage the data or just terminate it all.
Debian has an OpenSMTPD package. Dunno how well it runs on Linux. It has awesomely simple and straightforward configuration. I would be running it now but I wanted to do something relatively complicated. After evaluating the available choices I eventually settled on, you guessed it, Exim.
No. Costco is the best option. You can also return for a full refund.
Had to quit a company last year due to bigotry.

Constant bashing of white men on company calls. Exceptions if you were openly non straight. They also loved talking about how inclusive they were.

Constant mocking of customer base, who was mostly traditional white people.

I figure out quick I was hired only because they were desperate for someone with experience.

Which sadly meant hiring an undesirable.

At some point if I really need a job I may need to put on a dress.
One piece of concrete data is that a huge fraction of people in US cities 100 years ago married people who lived in their same block, and a substantial fraction in their same apartment building. That’s evidence of a different approach to mating.