skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Bulk install software or provisioning software on Windows
Hey all,

Trying to find a better way to install all of my dev tools when I get a fresh copy of Windows on my laptop. Current process is manual - just remember the programs I need/use/want then download and install one by one. It's tedious as you can imagine.

Are there any projects out there that ease this process? Ninite is pretty slick but the list of software is slim. Trying to find a better way to automate this task and looking to this group to crowdsource answers.

Thanks!
I wonder about the implications of running them in an "always-on" configuration. Would it be possible to remove the battery and run them entirely on AC power? If you could do that, you might be able to have some pretty nice low-power home servers.
I ditched them for OneDrive which comes with an Office365 subscription. OneDrive is buggy, has file naming issues (on MacOS at least), is a memory hog, and has a host of other issues. So I tried iCloud+ which comes with AppleOne subscription, and it lacks some of the sharing/directory collab features I wanted.

So yes, there are alternatives, many of which are free or included in other subscriptions, but they lack the focus of Dropbox, which Dropbox itself nearly lost when it tried to become something beyond file storage, versioning, and sharing.
This is an inevitable consequence from the push to make cloud companies responsible for the content they host. Analyzing all of it can only be automated; automation will deliver weird false positives.
I noticed the same with an older i7 here. The requirements are nonsensical.
I've always thought the Spanish succession war involved Spain, France, Great Britain, Netherlands and Germany[1]. Today I learnt it was about a catalonian rebellion.

[1]https://militarymaps.rct.uk/war-of-the-spanish-succession-17....
Exactly. The follow up questions would be "Reduces what bias? And increase what other bias?"
Unfortunately... yeah. It's not fun being the guy who wags his finger and scolds people for not hosting their content themselves, but there really is no reason to trust FAANG at this scale. If nothing else, be certain to have physical and offsite backups of your important iCloud/Drive/Dropbox data.
Naming a company for a founder is common
I believe what people have said is that the components can’t handle continuous use (instead of basically idling on user input). Even when being in use for the most part these machines just are rendering some textures onto the screen and the cpu is not doing much
HN loathes Dropbox. Most people recommend self-hosted competitors.
Who said they were talking about humans? They deliberately left out the noun modified by “male”, there must be some significance to that.
> If developers can't efficiently deliver what designers want, within
reason, that's most definitely the the fault of developers
collectively, even if it might be a big ask of a single developer
without sufficient experience or resources.

An interesting take on which part of the dog wags.

In your model, developers seem positioned to serve designers.

Having written a book on design, and practised it, I have to say that
web is very unusual in allowing designers such rein. In other
disciplines, like sound design or product design, the constraints and
requirements of the project come first, and designers need to fit
their work to that.

A very great many web projects I have seen fail went south the moment
"designers" got involved. Designers seems to wield an inappropriate
level of power and influence, and operate without proper technical
supervision, often breaking things or creating unreasonable demands.

I think this misalignment comes from the early days of the web, when
anyone who could write HTML called themself a web designer and took on
an entire site development. Even though post-CGI/database the
server-side roles were better differentiated, the legacy of "aesthetic
driven design" lingers.

I do not want to denigrate web designers, but times have changed and
in my opinion, having a website that "looks great" just isn't that
important these days. I'd much rather use simpler, accessible, secure,
private, content-centred sites.
It seems like it does need to. Banning people for content they legally posses seems pretty questionable.

Edit: You completely rewrote you comment after I responded, that is considered bad form on HN.
> There will be substantial amounts of code you are writing to provision, set up, maintain, scale, and troubleshoot all of those things.

And the amount of infra code you have to write to do that in AWS is any less? No, it's just as much, except more arcane.

> Getting your Java Spring web server to scale to thousands of concurrent instances will require a lot of undifferentiated work outside the scope of Java Spring.

Scaling a RESTful webserver is an exercise in slapping a load balancer in front of it and running a few more instances. Not exactly rocket science.

> Same with the care and feeding of RabbitMQ and Kafka

Same on AWS, except now you are at the mercy of someone else's whims to see this works when it fails.
All TOS violations on all platforms are always secret. They will never tell you what you did. We are all one secret violation away from digital homelessness. Being booted from Dropbox is probably one of the least bad boots you can get.
Am I the only one not understanding what’s the point of all these efforts to try to run Linux on completely closed with no documentation devices (like iPhones and even mace for that matter). Seems like a lot of effort, for a crappy solution that maybe 0.0001% is going to use before realizing it is crap. Even only effort to keep up with the yearly hw updates that apple does and the complete disregard for backward compatibility and writing hw documentation makes these effort just a technocrat exercise (very cool for sure), but I can’t see anything more than that
So does this work by essentially bypassing the PBM rebates process, and directly negotiating with the manufacturers?
Trust the science.
I would like for Dropbox to not know the contents of my dropbox.

Although in the olden days it was nice in that if they detected a matching hash of your file, it didn’t actually upload it, you just had it. So that was super handy. For pirating as well as for situations where I have the same file in multiple location. I legitimately have disk images in dropbox because cheap storage and having them immediately sync and be backed up was nice to save on bandwidth.
Yeah, but you have to convert the binary into a text representation. Same thing with email, you have to base64 encode binary to transform it into something capable of being represented by a string of ASCII characters.
It’s normal when they’re used as adjectives. Less so as nouns.
This event was what got me interested in satellite TV hacking. Fun times back then.
I mean that the release price of the M2 MBA including VAT (£1249) is that much higher than the release price of the M1 MBA including VAT (£999 - the same price as it is today on the apple store although in practice you can find them new from £850-ish).
This was a big part of why Steam was such a success. You get free updates, online multiplayer, storage of your games, cross-platform support, etc
The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism
Welcome to the Summer of Robots
Never had any CPU spikes from OneDrive. How much are you storing on it?
How do you scale an engineering team?
I’d like to aggregate best practices and experiences to scale engineering teams.

We’re working with engineering teams from 5 to 100 developers today and found out that almost every engineering managers face the same challenges: engineers’ well-being & retention, scaling new hires, maintaining engineering velocity, improving collaboration in a remote environment.

What is your best advice or piece of experience you’ve used to scale your engineering team? Do you follow specific metrics (DORA metrics, …) or framework (SPACE, …)? I’m particularly interested in helping engineers that start management positions without much experience.

Main takeaways we’ve seen so far: following key metrics to assess engineering sprints' health, regularly sending anonymous surveys to engineers for feedback, creating dedicated timeslots for engineering managers to work on non-direct tech topics (hiring, management, …).
How is the cost so low? we bypass the pharmacy middleman.

ooooh okay that is really neat

How do I get the drugs? order it from our pharmacy.

Wat?
You cannot simply say "it should be different" and then pretend that reality is what you think it should be.

And yes, we probably should be doing that. But in the meanwhile those places still exist, and will continue to exist for quite some time.
As I've opined here [1] I think OIDC is not a good example for an authentication protocol. As you are already into spec reading, you could take a look how SSH and TLS 1.3 (especially mutually authenticated TLS) handle the same topic. (All available freely as IETF RFCs.) And if you're interested in the cryptography, your can't go wrong with Cryptography Engineering (ISBN: 978-0470474242) by Ferguson, Schneier and Kohno.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31259826
Isn't it pointless to discuss this without knowing more about the communications that happened?
I'm still using iPad 2 for ebooks too.
Who cares. Honestly. Maybe it burnishes just image. Maybe he dominates the market and makes a mountain of money. Let’s make that trade 1000 times.
I assume they still have a local copy of it and can backup using an external drive. Because I am a Rick and Morty fan and I don't want any delays.
Dropbox has invested in infrastructure to do things like index and search the contents of your files.

VPS provider doesn't even necessarily have read access to your data, and because you aren't relying on them for search/index features, encryption is much less expensive from a functionality standpoint.
Weird, I thought the majority of cases were Fortnite downloads. But maybe that's malware in some sense. :)
Walmart certainly comes to mind.
It’s a little hyperbolic to say that nobody in the crypto industry cares about using cryptography for good.
You responded less than 60 seconds after I wrote my comment, the substance of which is unchanged. Organizing thoughts into words is a process for me, it takes a moment.
CVS = http://cvs.nongnu.org/ ?
As the link you provided implies (it's in the Security Considerations section of the document) this decision also prevents QPACK becoming an effective Oracle.

Attacks like CRIME or BREACH abuse compression with dynamic behaviour as an Oracle. The attacker can't see the secret token, but they can send arbitrary data over the wire with the secret token and the dynamic compression will adjust based on the attacker's inputs and the secret token, changing the compressed data size. Over many iterations they can learn what the token must be this way, but QPACK effectively defeats that, for HTTP/3 headers, while still delivering compression (you can of course also defeat these Oracle attacks by never using compression).
I believe this is a common issue with automated copyright detection systems. Companies don't seem to care much as the grief caused by a false positive is almost completely offloaded to the user.
As someone who just went through this (finished up loop at fb and google) - I can honestly say at first I HATED the idea of leetcoding/having to learn this stuff, but after a while I started actually learning the real concepts behind the problems and started looking at them like puzzles. I enjoy puzzles so this approach made these problems more approachable and engaging.
If you're Michael Scott Paper Company.
It happened to me... I had to give them a phone number (any, apparently) to get access back to it. I also had the correct password, and even the previous password but I didn't enable 2FA.

Sometimes it is also possible to unlock the account using another device that previously accessed it.

This is ridiculous... I now forward all my emails to another account just in case it happens again.
I should not have chosen Pascal as my primary programming language.

It is not even mentioned when looking for uncommon language mentions
Are those features of sftp? It cvs? Or the vps provider?

Or are you saying, "well, with a completely different stack I can get closer to feature parity"?
He wasn’t one of the original founders, he was an early investor.
FYI, the essay that proposes to read good books multiple times is from Rolf Dobelli: https://www.dobelli.com/en/essays/how-to-read-books/
remote attestation is a big one

netflix / online games / banking applications / ... will be able to check if your computer is tamperproof and will refuse to run if not

you already see this on android with safetynet: https://developer.android.com/training/safetynet/attestation

the other one is they'll be able to gatekeep the applications running on Windows (again like mobile phones)
It is illegal, whether people wish it wasn’t or think it’s sensible or downvote comments that point it out. Personally I think the gist of GDPR is more sensible than what you’re proposing as common sense - each person should have the right to decide what happens to data about them.
I like bringing up the Uniform Commercial Code [0] as a template for this kind of stuff. Where there’s a common goal and groups push for legislation in each state.

Sadly I’m not sure there’s a good advocacy group to push for this. Mozilla is funded by Google who definitely doesn’t want any user rights that conflict with their revenue. Maybe the EFF or FSF.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Commercial_Code
I’ve got a really beefy PC with Windows 10 on it. Apparently it “doesn’t meet the requirements” for Windows 11. Hopefully that means I’ll never be able to get it in an update.

Due to Microsoft’s insane forced update policy, I’ve moved to an M1 and am de-Microsofting everything in my setup. It doesn’t feel like my computer anymore.
You're very right, my bad. I meant to link to Fontsource:

https://fontsource.org/

They provide the tools to bundle the fonts and serve them yourself:

https://fontsource.org/fonts/merriweather-sans

Will update original comment.
Disk2vhd: Convert physical machines/disks to virtual
On the homepage they say they markup the manufacturing cost by 15%, include $3 for pharmacy labor, and finally apply shipping and handling based on location. It seem even with such healthy margins they're still an order of magnitude cheaper for some medications. Big Pharma looks obscene sometimes.
A lot of the Asian MMOs are pay-to-win, and it wouldn't surprise me that more Western game companies are moving in that direction... it is very profitable.
Yeah I think I understand the push towards that. I'm saying it's not really a "normal" thing. I live in a pretty liberal area and have yet to hear someone announce their pronouns. I sometimes see it listed in someone's slack or twitter bio or something though. Generally we're just running on context clues and stuff.
What sort of nerdass doesn't host their own server?
Few years back there was quite some stir about how feeding seaweed to cattle reduces methane by a huge extent. It was announced as a pretty significant discovery that should have a big impact on greenhouse emissions. I wonder what's happening to that idea, if efforts are being made to roll it out or there were some limitations?
What does Syncthing add to the Nextcloud capabilities? (Honest question because I'm curious; I have a NextCloud & snapshot to encrypted S3 backup solution already.)
hey, this is the internet, a headline is enough to get your pitchforks out and battle your favorite strawman.
700M, is that active users? Or does my old account I haven't touched in forever counts?
Inter-zone traffic is $0.01/GB EACH WAY. So in effect it's $0.02/GB
https://www.duckbillgroup.com/blog/aws-cross-az-data-transfe...
probably efficient because their codebase size would outstretch local disk space requirements, and also would allow for comprehensive access controls
The official tool from Microsoft is available from: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/disk...
Dear Everyone,

Please keep using Leet Code in interviews so I can continue to hire extremely talented developers with little competition from out of state companies that like to pay 60% more than local prevailing wages. Thanks.
Why is this being pushed multiple times on Reddit and on Hacker News? Seems like a marketing campaign for clout.
That's "supported" in a somewhat weak and contrived sense.

I think a lot of people would, in practice, expect "supported" to mean that they can use their device to run the latest version of macOS.
Dogs usually bite out of fear, in self defense when they perceive a threat, either to them or to their territory.
> I guess I'm most confused about where the connection between Ory and the application server is.

There might be none. The response from an identity provider (Ory) is signed and encrypted, is given to the user who is being authenticated and then the user brings it to the application. The process usually happens via browser redirects, but can be more manual. The response contains information about who the user is, their identifiers and properties. It is totally possible to have a scenario where the application is air-gapped.

There might be some interaction if the application wants to enrich the passed response.

I cannot suggest any books, but you could search about SAML2, OpenID Connect (oidc), identity providers and service providers.
This article is pretty bad. Almost every number in this list (ugh, top ten lists on HN) is either not surprising and/or not even related to HTTP in any meaningful way. Like "HTTP is just text" is not surprising in the least, likewise "HTTP is TCP but could go over any delivery protocol" has virtually nothing to do with HTTP.
Waymo Will Begin Putting Self-Driving Tractor-Trailers into Uber Freight Network
It's a common failure mode for a kind of products (SaaS) YC frequently funds. While it probably happens rarely, its consequences can be devastating for those affected, and thus it's a problem that needs fixing -- yet no progress seems to happen in the industry.

Overall, it's similar in relevance to security breaches. Awareness needs to be raised. Thus I'd argue it's relevant.
The problem is the 1st surface mirrors not the vehicles structural walls.
That usage that leaks sensitive information.
Libertarians by definition aren’t taking one for the collective team
They bypass the people who sell drugs to existing pharmacies by operating their own D2C pharmacy themselves.

Instead of:

Pharma co -> Distribution -> Pharmacy -> You

It's:

Pharma co -> Cost Plus -> You.

Cost plus is still a pharmacy by definition.
I absolutely love this comment, but very few creative media actually work like this. Valve is able to create a market where it makes sense to discount older games, which means that people buy more of them, and developers come out ahead. This works because Steam is fixed price pay-per-game - the more games you play, the more money comes out of your pocket and goes to the developers. This is quite possibly the most consumer-friendly business model you could pick where you still get paid for your work.

It's tempting to look at Netflix and say, "oh they're stupid, why would they stop being like they were in 2012". The reality is that 2012 Netflix streaming was never going to last. They were dramatically underpricing their subscription because nobody in the TV industry understood streaming[0] and thus underpriced their TV shows. When TV companies realized, "oh no, people are actually cancelling cable to subscribe to Netflix", they started to charge Netflix higher rates... because it turns out the TV business sort of just requires that $100 + ad revenue come out of your pocket every month no matter if the bill collector is called Comcast or Netflix.

Sports are like this but worse. Out of that $100+ads that cable costs, the ad revenue pays for the entertainment, and the $100 pays for the sports, because pretty much every sport is far more extravagantly expensive to run than you'd think, and never pays its way for anything[1]. This is also why sports will often have extremely customer-hostile business practices and weird blackout policies - because the audience itself has been sold to other companies who can then force them to pay more money.

[0] Remember how there was a writers' strike about a decade and a half ago, over, among other things, streaming royalties? TV execs genuinely thought that Netflix was never really going to take off and replace cable. Just like how the music execs thought downloads were never really going to take off and replace CDs.

[1] If you really want to get angry, look up how much money your city is paying in tax credits to your local sports teams.
The iPad 2 is a perfect example.

It is good some people still find use for it. However, it is a device that would be perfectly capable of being used to surf the web… but Apple stopped releasing updates for Safari and forbids alternative browser engines for iOS. The web is essentially broken on it, and I'm not even talking about the security issues that it probably has as a consequence..

I'd say it is exactly the example of a device that is today unusable for many things its hardware could handle just fine for no good reason, and therefore obsolete for many people.

Obsolete because of its closed nature. This obsolescence was planned. Maybe not intentionally to make you buy a new one, but still bad and the consequences are the same. Many people probably replaced their iPad 2 with a new tablet for exactly this reason. Or bought a new tablet even if they still use their iPad 2 for the uses cases the iPad 2 is not capable of handling anymore. Apple should be legally forced to enable third parties to support this hardware.

Next time you consider buying closed hardware (not just Apple, and Android tablets are certainly problematic too), think about the iPad 2. Closed => Waste.
You can buy a sportsnet subscription for $12/mo, directly from sportsnet, and stream all the NHL games (and more) live in the sportsnet app.

I got it for the playoffs, it was easy, and I was ok with the pricing.
We don't have good smartphone OS. There is candy crush OS A and candy crush OS B. Otherwise the devices would be quite amazing.

I don't think smartphones are safer than PCs at all. On which metric? Leaking personal and private information? Digital fraud? Sure, that isn't called malware on smartphones, there we call it just app.

I compiled Android multiple times and kudos to those still sticking to it for new models and security patches. Of course it isn't just the OS developer that is guilty here. But overall the devices are trash, even those > 1000$.
So is the cost actually low? The last time this came up on HN people agreed the costs are standard and the other pharmacies do not charge the high prices on the comparisons.
M1 with SIP enabled (by default) isn't "your computer" either.
Rust OSDev May 2022 update
Eric Schmidt's new investment firm deepens his ties to the US military
As someone who recently migrated off of Dropbox, you can get most of the features with open source systems like Syncthing and a self hosted server.

The main complication to implement is encryption at rest for the data (I use luks2 on a hd and the fs of a raspi controller) and secure remote access (wireguard works really well and is easy to manage).

I wireguard into my remote systems and have Syncthing configured only to local network (no relays etc). It works beautifully; not missing dropbox at all.

I am still working out a viable alternative for things like document scanning, but I have no regrets owning my data.
>Also assuming that my fingers aren’t removed in a thresher accident.

This wouldn't happen with a $5 pitchfork and a stone threshing floor
Does this event shake your confidence in Dropbox's helpful humans?
I feel like he has a shot. But from what I know about him I don't think he'd want the headache.