skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This sounds terribly amateurish, and even unfair.

I have a hard time believing that the 40-50 other software forensics experts didn't recognise ASCII in hex, or bother converting these files even if they didn't.

If I understand correctly, he only analysed a tiny proportion of the data. Junk or not, it doesn't disprove that the remaining majority held key evidence.

He "determined that nothing in the file was related to the 2020 presidential election". What is "determined" here?

It sounds like this was more of a gaming of the system than it was a forensic investigation. There must be an awful lot missing here.

Edit:

Having read the full report now, I am of the opinion that this was a(n attempted) fraudulent competition by a wealthy moron, exploited by an unscrupulous parasite with the good fortune of misleading arbitrators into a skewed perception of the competition terms that guaranteed his success. Both of them acted disgracefully; this should have been a criminal matter dealing with the fraud, and the other hack shouldn't have a dime to show for it.
> After all, I invented the field of software forensics

Stopped there
I am finding "cloud" to be a pleasant experience at the moment.

We are building a B2B service in Azure using Az Functions & Az SQL Database as the primary components. That's about it. We figured out you can "abuse" Az Functions to serve all manner of MVC-style web app (in addition to API-style apps) by using simple PHP-style templating code. Sprinkle in AAD authentication and B2B collaboration and you have a really powerful, secure/MFA auth solution without much suffering. Things like role enforcement is as simple as taking a dep on ClaimsPrincipal in the various functions.

The compliance offerings are really nice too. Turns out if you use the compliant services without involving a bunch of complicated 3rd party bullshit, you wind up with something that is also approximately compliant. For those of us in finance, this is a really important factor. 10 person startups don't have much bandwidth for auditing in-house stacks every year. If you do everything "the Azure way", it is feasible for you to grant your partners (or their auditors) access to your tenant for inspection and expect that they could find their own way around. If you do it "my way" you better be prepared to get pulled into every goddamn meeting.

I am starting to wonder if not all clouds are made equal anymore. We also have some footprint in AWS (we used to be 100% AWS), but it's really only for domain registration and S3 buckets these days. GCP doesn't even fly on my radar. I've only ever see one of our partners using it.
Guitar Slinger Reconstructed
People are still actively working on Illumos. The last change was yesterday morning.

* https://illumos.org

People are still actively working on MirBSD. There's a CVS commit account that can be followed on the FediVerse.

* http://www.mirbsd.org

It's DragonFly BSD, not Dragon BSD, and the irony of that is that you missed FreeBSD, which is of course still going.

* https://dragonflybsd.org

* https://freebsd.org

As is GhostBSD, which tracks FreeBSD.

* https://ghostbsd.org

HardenedBSD is still going. Shawn Webb regularly talks about it on the FediVerse.

* https://hardenedbsd.org
The case document is especially interesting: https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/a68b42f4-d5dc-4ff9-...
I think it's mainly a cautionary tale for the "let's write a browser engine" camp.
With chatgpt/ai you could even transform it into a "working" story perhaps haha.
I think it would be great if the homepage could have a prominent link to the documentation as it wasn't obvious to me where to find it. I followed the link to Github which in the readme has a howto for building the project and there is a docs folder which has a few documents mostly with dealing how to get started contributing.

In the end I think a good entry seems to tbe the Wiki on Github: https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki

I would also love to have a clear overview page that shows a high level view of the state of the engine in terms of feature support/completeness.

I'd love to see the project getting revitalized and gain traction now that it is outside Mozilla and maybe maybe eventually a new phoenix might rise.
The article concentrates on different types of consumption. I find what really makes people happy is creating rather than consuming.
>sure, but giving some data from a previous test is in various ways a hint on what to study

The data was given on a site that students shouldn't have been accessing in the first place ("looking at other tests without the instructor’s permission counts as cheating"). It's not as if the teacher fed them these fake answers.
other evil ideas:

- return a 200 with broken JSON, possibly triggering parse errors or exceptions in the caller

- return a payload that generates catastrophic resource consumption on the other end, e.g Content-Encoding: gzip and feed it a deflate bomb

- hack TCP and/or TLS to leave the other end waiting/stalling in an attempt to rate limit (timeout) or starve resources (ulimit) on the other end (e.g abuse 3 way handshake)
I’ve used to live in an inter generational big house (Italians am I right… even if we are not actually born there we still have spaghetti dna). Anyway I’ve setup one very lightweight asterix instance of statically defined accounts. A few cheap voip phones were installed through the house plus soft phones on personal smartphones.

It was supposed to make things more convenient. Supposed to, because we just kept yelling to convey messages. When I’ve moved out I’ve dismantled the system since I wouldn’t be there to keep it maintained.
You have an ecosystem where most software is made for free by enthusiasts, and orders of magnitude less people may be paid a bit for some of the core parts.

How do you expect the much bigger former group would work on your new thing? They wont, unless it starts spreading. And it can’t really spread unless it is being supported by all the community. That decade was mostly a build up — once it has the critical mass, improvements will be exponentially greater.

Anyone saying that it is a drop because it already took a decade is just not familiar with how any of open source/bazaar projects work.
It would be nice if you could make the effective character sizes more uniform.
Ask HN: Searching for an article about crisis management
Hi :)

A while ago I read (here) an article someone wrote about "crisis management" in the company he works.

The summary was that he wrote a document which had a "scoring system" for each scenario.

Can you help me find it? I want to send it to my manager
Refugee Labor Market Access Increases Support for Immigration
JSON at least I pretty much never see being generated from templates. In the few cases where someone I worked with suggested it I've easily argued them away from it. The difference between JSON and HTML in this regard is illustrative. Every language already has a data structure that is easy to manipulate and also to translate directly into JSON. There is generally no built-in "DOM" data structure. And even if you have one (as you do in browser JS) or find a third-party DOM library, it's usually awkward to manipulate.
They definitely do that for all those sweet.. UnixPorn screenshots, or what exactly?
> What about "not aware that other people are doing far worse"?

Exactly this! Because I was raised to have a shred of empathy for my fellow humans, I actually take joy from the happiness and success of others around me, and seeing (or knowing) the suffering of others really does me no favors at all.
AFAIK Google Coral is an inexpensive TPU you can buy right now: https://coral.ai/products/accelerator/
"Schriften von Monotype, die speziell an diese Empfehlungen angepasst wurden, tragen den Namenszusatz „1450“."
Thank you for sharing this. Much more interesting than the arrogant slop published in Politico by this Zeidman character.
All the files were modified post election. The files he did check where all just meaningless lists of IP addresses in RTF documents.
One way was SIP and SRV DNS records. Seemed like it had some of the problems email has except it’s a phone ringing instead of spam.
There are a few on itch.io: https://itch.io/games/platform-web/tag-open-source/tag-real-...

Open source games are not really constrained by devs, I think. I'd say that dev work is the one that's best covered in the open source game development. Project management, marketing, asset production, user experience, quality assurance, product management seem to be much more underserved.
Ask HN: Why are virtual machines so difficult these days?
I think I have used VMware Workstation
since its first release and I still use it.
At home and at work.

Through the years I have one ESX( whatever
they call the commercial version of it now)
For work.

I have used Fusion at work.

I have also used a few of the alternative
free ones.

It used to be, take the iso boot the VM,
go through the installation and things are great.
It just worked. (Well not always)

For the past year and a half at least,
getting something running on VMware workstation,
and QNAP, and unRaid at home.

Get the ISO, pick the "Windows 10" profile.
Boot, Nope, issues right away.

Get the ISO, pick the Ubuntu profile that matches iso, boot, nope.

(I think that is due to it requires a help with the
hd).

I find work arounds usually after tinkering with it.

OpenBSD however installs without issue on all of them. Like I expect installations to go.

The VM should not be that different from an installation on a physical machine. Why are there so many more problems now?

Has anyone else noticed?
Think of all the email spam you get from cold sales outreach.
Thank you, I don't drink.

I'm not saying that summers are bad, I'm saying that winters are fine. Sure, there's SAD which affects some portion of the population, and some things do wind down and we live in different ways at different times of the year. Personally I don't like scorching heat, but I do enjoy the long nights - a definite benefit of being up north!

But you were implying somehow that we're lying on these rankings or what? That winter is so bad it somehow cancels out the fact that we are, a lot of us, largely in freedom from fear and want, to quote your Roosevelt, in a way that is fairly unique in this world? I promise you that it is real.
Virginia lottery flaw lets same people win repeatedly
I've read about this.
The most obvious avenues for election fraud are around the edges. Check out Ballot Harvesting

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballot_collection

This lead to a fraud conviction and a subsequent special election in North Carolina https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/us/mccrae-dowless-indictm...

Here is a list of real convictions:

https://www.congress.gov/116/meeting/house/108824/documents/...

You must realize that a criminal conviction through the slow cogs of justice likely means the problem is 100x larger.

But all that said, Trump still lost and there isn’t a widespread coverup. I’m merely pointing out that election fraud does happen and we could do better as a society to make that less possible if we really tried.
Ask HN: What are the 40 papers that created ChatGPT?
I read a John Carmack interview where he said this:

So I asked Ilya, their chief scientist, for a reading list. This is my path, my way of doing things: give me a stack of all the stuff I need to know to actually be relevant in this space. And he gave me a list of like 40 research papers and said, ‘If you really learn all of these, you’ll know 90% of what matters today.’ And I did. I plowed through all those things and it all started sorting out in my head.

What are these 40 papers? Anyone have any ideas?
By analogy:

"We can't fly into space, the propellers will have nothing to push against"

"We have rockets for that, they're more expensive but don't have that limitation."

"I see we're reaching the 'you're holding it wrong' stage with propulsion."
>The exceptions were when the whole class did poorly and no one would have gotten better than a C - then they adjusted to ensure some people got at least a B - but usually not based on a distribution.

See, that illustrates the problem. If cheating pushes grades up, then the difficulty won't be adjusted, even if no-one would actually have gotten high grades if it wasn't for cheating. The professor might think the test was fine because at least some people got Bs, but what if all those people cheated?
From the time that my appendix ruptured (after being told it was a virus and I should go home at the GP) to the time that I had my first operation of three, they waited 38 hours. This was in the UK, 5ish years ago.
As I read it, his forensics was unsophisticated (who trusts file modified dates on files that have clearly been copied?), but his analysis was enough to give him the confidence to call Lindell’s bluff, which none of the others did.

The author thought that Lindell was sending everyone on a wild goose chase with irrelevant data, and Lindell couldn’t defend against that claim in arbitration.
Windows had some security issues in the past. It has a font rendering engine in the kernel.
Who are the new funders for Igalia's work?
Only a clean-house reimplementation, by not looking at the code, just the functionality.
How can you say that a list of IP addresses is meaningless without investigating who was behind them? There can be a lot of information there.

The idea that someone would set up some kind of hacker convention and offer a reward for hundreds of experts to parse through gigabytes of random fake data that they intentionally created sounds beyond insane. What is the motive for that? I didn't even hear about this convention, so it can't be a PR stunt...

It's just not believable. If that's where we're at, we might as well believe the majority of conspiracy theories which are less far-fetched than this.
Modern silicon PV cells are cheap, non-toxic, stable, and their efficiency is more than half of the theoretical maximum. The big challenge is storage, PV generation already outperforms any other power source.
Invest money on companies who want to improve our life
> It's not like having dolphin on steam will give you access to free gamecube and wii games. You will still have to get them yourself and/or any bioses that may be required,...

Yet.
This isn't hidden in a user agreement, it's on the front page.
That's hardly necessary in corporate America. They only need to look like a good team leader to the higher ups.
Not surprising it was _Just Dance_ The 2019 one was the last XBOX 360 title too.
I once built a micro-mouse from scratch, intending to compete. I built a Z80 based computer with 8KB RAM and 8KB ROM, programmed directly in Z80 assembler.

I build the chassis from perspex and brass, turning my own spacers to hold the various boards in the right places. I used DC motors, made my own power controllers, opto-isolators, shaft encoders, IR wall distance detectors, servo steering assembly, bearings for the front wheel, ...

Everything.

Then the night before the competition I blew out my one and only EEPROM by plugging it into the programmer backwards.

Never got to compete.

But I still have Harvey[0] somewhere. I should pull him out and make a series of videos about his construction. But it was 35 years ago and the technology has changed ... I doubt anyone would be interested, especially because he never competed.

But I was proud of building the computer from scratch and having it work first time, and of being able to run down my homebuilt section of "corridor" without hitting the walls. At the time no mice had run diagonally, so I really was in the running, provided it ran.

Oh well.

[0] No, not named after the cocktail[1], but after the smallest species of mouse in the UK. It's the "Harvest Mouse", or "Micromys minutus".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Wallbanger
Some details would be good: what machine was the host, what network, how many clients, which 0ad version? Just curious.
> Is compositing different bitmaps an embarrassingly parallel problem?

If you can make an initial approximate guess of the area for each section, you can split regions with lower and upper size constraints that can be laid out in parallel. A global branch and bound algorithm can coordinate those processes, tightening the upper constraints of one region when another connected region exceededs its minimum bounds.

Indeed there still may be degenerate cases where multiple regions need to be recalculated several times, but overall the default case should be able to finish without much conflict.
In parts of popular media, there seems to be an assumption of a very high certainty for an impending "economic productivity revolution thanks to LLM AI". Case studies like this one show the future isn't so clear.
No. Thinkering with emulators by the age of 14 made me very capable to set up almost any virtualizer/emuator by just reading the documentation. From graphical ones to command line based ones, from Zinc to Qemu.
The lawyer claims that they have "never utilized Chat GPT as a source for conducting legal research prior to this occurrence and therefore was unaware of the possibility that its content could be false."

Every time I open the thing I get a popup with "While we have safeguards in place, the system may occasionally generate incorrect or misleading information and produce offensive or biased content. It is not intended to give advice."
I put in an asterix system 20 years ago, it still runs great, all I've done has been to replace a couple of dying (RAIDed) drives. I live in NZ used to live in the Bay Area, NZ trunks come in from a local SIP provider and use an Ooma box for our old US phone number, in home we had 5 FXSs and a sip phone in my office - everyone had a phone in their bedroom, and a couple on public spaces.

It's set up so that all incoming calls hit a voice prompt saying which 1-digit extension you should enter to get who (this stops 99% of phone spam) - everyone gets a voicemail on their extension which rings in their bedroom and rolls over to the common spaces - and everyone gets a unique ring cadence, my daughter who at one point got 80% of the phone calls got the 2 short rings.

The kids have gone, we've moved to a smaller house, only 2 extensions, but that same hardware soldiers on (and still stops 99% of the spam - I've had 1 call in the past year)
Group chats is another obvious feature.
I'm comparing the usage of two resources which can be helpful or completely misleading, depending on how familiar you are with their purpose/limitations and your experience with them.
I remember IRIX as that operating system that had an amazing number of exploits, and they went unpatched for so long. It looked like there wasn't a buffer that they wouldn't overflow...
It's unfair to the students who don't cheat, and makes it hard to correctly calibrate the difficulty of exams.
> Ground Control

A surprisingly unknown title. Always wished it had a third campaign with base building or a level editor though.
US govt under fire for promoting sales of spyware
Machine Learning Masters, maybe PhD
Sheep is the fursona they use, WG14 is the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG14 C standards committee.
Snapchat kinda has this, in that you can @ their AI in a conversation. It's beyond dull though if you try to get it to talk about the people in the conversation, so I'm not sure if it actually gets given any knowledge about it.
> While SGI boxes were beautiful, IRIX itself was... not. It had a Motif look which looked outdated, even compared to OS/2.

That is true, and it gave a super confusion feeling about seeing stuff like Maya running on it, which was peak software IMO (I mean, algebra friendly reactive DAG based, complex geometry rendering, including near real time constrained physics simulation.. with server/client split and noob-moldable/scriptable UI). So even if the DE felt lagging, you never cared much.
Will you make an updated version?
I've written about it elsewhere in this thread but I've found that a simple vopice menu that has a message (that might sound like a voicemail to a spammer's dial computer) and that requires people dialing in to press one key stops 99% of spammers
I’ve been out of the browser rendering engine game for a long time.

But even back in the day, the various ways that a DOM element’s physical layout could escape its parent’s bounding box, the multiple stages of coordinate evaluation, the zillion edge cases: it’s hard.

And that’s assuming that all inputs are perfectly formed. By the time you’ve cranked in enough Poe’s Law to be more than a tech demo, and enough performance to interest anyone?

It’s one of the nastiest practical problems you’ll encounter in a long career and the cross product of the kooky standard and the bugs you have to honor on the real web, a back compat story worse than Win32 mean that there’s no One Elegant Answer.

It’s a fucking mess and my hat is tipped to the hard-ass veterans who can even make a credible attempt.

I’d rather be on the hook for a modern RDBMS than a modern browser.
How’s that unethical?

Love it.
i feel the same. i may not have had a great career, but when i look back at my life i did many interesting things, and most of my life was not unmemorable, in-between moments. in fact, by living in different countries away from home most of the time i made those unmemorable moments to be memorable. try going to a chinese wet-market without having learned chinese, even after years of doing that, even just the fact that it becomes routine is memorable to me.
> Some web pages are really pathological with relayout costs

I'm always wondering how much do these awesome pathological sites contribute to CO2 emissions. Along with ADs, autoplay videos, huge and slow JS libraries, animations, and other needless and outright unwanted content. Even more on mobile. I'd say it's a lot and could be cut off immediately with very positive impact and no real loss.
Language Models Do Not Recognize Identifier Swaps in Python
Mike Lindell got duped by whoever gave him the data but in reality he duped himself by not hiring this guy to QA it. On the other hand, he did end up hiring him by default by placing the bet so...meh.

If it were me I would have pursued the proprietary software for the machines which should not be proprietary. It's counting votes. Nothing special about that software. It should be available for anyone to look at. It's impossible to claim there was no voter fraud without seeing that software. I believed Bill Clinton as a kid right up until the point the blue dress was made public. After that nobody believed Bill.
Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/AVMiceliBarone/status/166215065632766361...
Yep, if I set 'Allow Incoming SIP Messages from SIP Proxy Only' to 'no' (allows direct SIP-SIP calls) on my home VoIP service, I'll get a silent call from '500' about every minute or so.
It says that you can call it unlimited number of times, not millions of devices that you’re selling.
Rust helped Servo. But Servo also helped Rust:

I encourage people to listen to Josh Matthews interview [0]. He talks about how, early on, Servo was a "guiding light for Rust".

0: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9ydXN0YWNlYW4tc3R...
VoIP used to be standard on phones, even mobile smartphones. So I setup Asterisk so that family members could call each others as long as they where on WIfi. Unfortunately VoIP is no longer a built in standard so you need to download an app to use it. Before you could just dail 1 and my phone would ring, dail 2 and you would reach my wife.
Why is it now insecure? A quick Google hasn't found me anything.
There are, but then you have to show in court how you got these files.

Which since they were created just before the competition, apparently wasn't possible.

Even if someone did all you said and accidentally changed the file modification date, you should have some original data source with an earlier file modification date.