skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nifty diagrams, but they should be taken with a huge grain of salt of course.

For example it shows EN/DE and EN/NO as having equivalent distances (49) when obviously EN/DE are much closer than either is to NO (in any holistic comparison of the three languages). It also shows IT/FR as being significantly closer (31) than IT/SP (40) when that's also plainly not the case -- again if we consider the distance between respective language pairs holistically (which includes a whole lot of other factors like phonemic footprint, meter, etc).

In short this reads like pretty much the kind of post one would expect from a "brain candy" site like this.

Less harshly (assuming good indent on the author's part), it demonstrates the pitfalls of relying on a single score (which in itself can be subject to all kinds of weighting and sampling biases) simply because it's a "score" and we're all supposed to be "data-driven" in our analyses these days.

But again -- nifty diagrams, and they do at least give a feel for the topic of mutual intelligibility and language distance (even if the scores themselves don't seem to be particularly meaningful).
I’ve had an issue with it before in my work MacBook. It would just keep causing the system to hang, making the computer unusable. Had to get IT to remove it.
3.5mm jack, microSD and removable batteries is the holy grail.

The only reason these aren't included anymore on flagship phones is because companies think they can upsell you on BT headphones, cloud storage plans and extended warranties. They're building for shareholder value, not the customer.

Plenty of midrange and low end phones still come with the jack and microSD, but removable batteries seem to be extinct.
This looks like a test file that got deployed. Perhaps a QA test was newly added which ran and overwrote the build. This is all I can think of.
Though I like your humbleness, there are more countries and visitors on HN from other countries than the USA and Bangladesh.
One thing to consider with security software, though, is that time is of essence when it comes to getting protection again 0day vulnerabilities.

Gotta think that the pendulum might swing into the other direction now and enterprises will value gradual, canary deployments over instant 100% coverage.
So have we decided to stop using checksums or something?
Not if you look at them like insurance premiums — it's a monthly cost like any other
Anyone have a technical writeup of the actual bug? I'm trying to explain how this could happen to people who think this is related to AI or cyber attacks.

What happened to the QA testing, staggered rollouts, feature flags, etc.? It's really this easy to cause a boot loop?

To me, BSOD indicates kernel level errors, which I assume Crowdstrike would be able to cause because it has root access due to being a security application. And because it's boot-looping, there's not a way to automatically push out updates?
AI paid for by Ads – the GPT-4o mini inflection point
I roasted some Booz Allen booth people when they asked me about cyber with a," the 90s called and wants its buzz word back."

The look they gave was priceless.
FYI I do see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41007985, it's currently on page six (out of ten) of this megathread and it looks normal (not dead or flagged).
who is hiring these fucking idiots? they need to be blacklisted
Well it’s not aimed at IT people and programmers (though the policies still apply to them), it’s aimed at everyone else who doesn’t understand what a phishing email looks like.
"would be blacklisted, deplatformed, or deamplified by consolidated authorities"

Sorry. Not true. You have Black Swan (Taleb) and Drift into Failure (Dekker) among many other books. These ideas are very well known to anyone who makes the effort.
> It really depends whether it's "easier" for the network to learn an intuitive physics, versus a laundry list of superficial hacks that let it minimise loss all the same

The latter is always easier. Not to mention that the architectures are fundamentally curve fitters. There are many curves that can fit data, but not all curves are casually related to data. The history of physics itself is a history of becoming less wrong and many of the early attempts at problems (which you probably never learned about fwiw) were pretty hacky approximations.

> Hinton argues

Hinton is only partially correct. It entirely depends on the conditions of your optimization. If you're trying to generalize and understand causality, then yes, this is without a doubt true. But models don't train like this and most research is not pursuing these (still unknown) directions. So if we aren't conditioning our model on those aspects, then consider how many parameters they have (and aspects like superposition). Without a doubt the "superficial hacks" are a lot easier and will very likely lead to better predictions on the training data (and likely test data).
Singles Apply for a Mate at City Hall's Dept. Of Romance
The earthship design includes a lot of ideas from permaculture design. Dirksen has also toured Brad Landcaster's site, in which the permaculture design is very obvious, and it is not an earthship. Those design principles and method applies to any region, biome, or climate, so even if you may never get to build an earthship, you can still use permaculture design wherever you land.
Sony hasn't been relevant in the phone industry since the transition to smartphones. Samsung, Huawei, Lenovo and others sell millions of phones with these features, but the flagship models still exclude them.
Effects of Accelerated Instruction on Students
I had that "oh crap, I'm old" moment when my initial reaction was "what? You've never heard of finger?!" and then I remembered I last used it in the late 90s.

I'm glad your reaction was to assist the young folks. :)
Good thing that EU is bringing the removable batteries back.
New York, Ukraine
That kind of phrasing lends itself to some wild misunderstandings...
>they'll just lobby using sympathetic points like yours

I suggest you read my post again because your response doesn't seem to be related to my post. Your response is taking issue with private prisons and with businesses making money off prisons. My post was specific to people being okay with imprisoning someone, making no statement if it was in a private or public prison, but not being okay with fining someone.

If you want to discuss how to make sure prisons aren't ran in such a way to ensure you don't have a pressure to increase prison usage, that is a fair discussion to have, but unrelated to the specific critique I was criticizing.
Standards of what? Microsoft cannot force the third party company to test their own builds before releasing them.
I've always said so. The essence of visual programming is watching code and runtime values juxtaposed, not connecting code primitives with fancy connectors.

Modern IDEs have lots of visual features, specially tailored to support production languages. Inspection panels, tooltips with variable values and function definitions...

Surely we could add more spatial visualization tools to them. But the step up from printf to a debugging inspector panel was on its own a great advance in building a mental model of the program state and making sense of its behaviour, which is what visual programming is all about.

For programmers interested in advanced visual tools tailored to software creation, see Bret Victor's essays on notations:

https://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/

https://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/
Perhaps true in some cases but in regulated insustries (example fed regulated banks) a tool like crowdstrike addresses several controls that if uncontrolled result in regulatory fines. Regulated companies rarely employ home grown tools due to maintainance risk. But now as we see these rootkit or even agent based security tools bring their own risks.
Teaching Paradox, Imperator, Part I: Divisa in Partes Tres
> We’re definitely in a moment. I’ve seen a large shift away from discipline in the field. People don’t seem to care about professionalism or “good work”.

Agreed. Thinking back to my experience at a company like Sun, every build was tested on every combination of hardware and OS releases (and probably patch levels, don't remember). This took a long time and a very large number of machines running the entire test suites. After that all passed ok, the release would be rolled out internally for dogfooding.

To me that's the base level of responsibility an engineering organization must have.

Here, apparently, Crowdstrike lets a code change through with little to no testing and immediately pushes it out to the entire world! And this is from a product that is effectively a backdoor to every host. What could go wrong? YOLO right?

This mindset is why I grow to hate what the tech industry has become.
Ok... Would a Linux based infrastructure be more resilient.

Does Linux require Crowdstrike style AV software?
"sounds" being the operative word. I don't consider being able to erase something on a photo, or add something to be a compelling enough use case. The AI demos I've seen have been pretty pathetic relative to the hype they're trying to build.
Rolling back an Active Directory server is a spectacularly bad idea. Better make doubly sure it's not connected to any network before you even attempt to do so.
Swiss Re unit, goodcarbon unveil carbon credit insurance
But you're more likely to encounter problems. That's likely a good thing as it improves your DR documentation and processes but could be a harder sell to the suits.
New tech helps find hidden details in whale, cassowary and other animal calls
Ubuntu has unattended-upgrades enabled by default
> maybe also print critical stuff per patient once a day?

Yep, the business continuity boxes are basically minimally connected PDF archives of patient records "printed" multiple times a day.
I still keep the points, so perhaps a loss of possible future points. The points don't bother me, I restart antonymous accounts on occasion. I kind of use points to get an idea of where other peoples opinions which is half the reason I use this site. A negative signal to something I think is good is actually more interesting than a positive signal. I'm more worried about the damage such actions do to the 'market place of ideas' and if it hasn't pushed me away then perhaps it has pushed others that I'm interested to hear from. And if so where have they gone. Once I become disinterested in the opinions of others on this site then it's unlikely I'll have any further use for hacker news - and I'm getting pretty close to that point.
Third party mystery meat is mostly intended for scapegoating if a problem does occur.
> Add that to the fact that we’ve also been overpromised new shiny things that turn out to he disappointments

I was a young developer when Enterprise Java was the future, and the way you knew it was the future was that it used XML for _everything_, so I'm not sure things are so different in that respect.

I don't remember getting excited about the hyped new stuff that VCs were excited about. I remember getting excited about simple stuff, almost dumb stuff. I remember getting my mind blown by powerful programming concepts, but I also remember getting my mind blown that I could select text in emacs and run a shell command on it with a few keystrokes.

I guess when I learned these things I didn't automatically crush my excitement with thoughts like "you can't make a business out of this" or "other people already know this" or "there are bigger, higher-leverage ideas I also need to be pursuing" or "I might get laid off from this job and never be able to get a software development job again." I did have those thoughts -- after the dot-com bust, nobody was sure the programming job market would recover again -- but I had them separately. I didn't feel like I needed to crush the pleasure I took in small things to make room for the big things.

P.S. If you're burned out by grandiose promises, a tool like DuckDB is a refreshing change. It was probably built to solve a really hard problem for somebody, but for me it's a humble little tool that scales down nicely to annoying file munging problems that feel like they should be easier. If you have a CSV file and want to run a SQL query on it, or you want to write a query that joins a CSV file with a JSON file, it'll have you there in no time, no need to write a script or fire up a Jupyter session.
There a lot of applications for which a MCU is sufficient and it will be much cheaper and it will have a much lower power consumption.

However not even the fastest existing MCUs, i.e. those with Cortex-M85 cores, can reach processing or memory speeds comparable with CPUs like the Intel Alder Lake N series or the Arm CPUs using Cortex-A78 or Cortex-A76 cores.

The fastest MCUs may have a clock frequency of up to 1 GHz, but most of them have clock frequencies many times lower (this is because the MCU cores use shorter pipelines), while the SBCs use clock frequencies between 2 and 4 GHz.

The Cortex-M7 or Cortex-M85 MCU cores have an IPC (instructions per clock cycle) that is 2 to 3 times higher than the IPC of most other MCU cores, but even their IPC is 2 to 3 times lower than of Alder Lake N, Cortex-A78 or Cortex-A76. Due to the much higher clock frequency and IPC, the SBCs are much faster than any MCU.

Due to the MCU clock frequencies being under 1 GHz, not even their cache memories can have throughputs as high as the DDR memories of the SBCs, which use 4.267 to 4.8 giga transfers per second.

So any modern SBC will run circles "around the processing and memory capabilities" of any MCU. However, you are right that in many cases the speed of a SBC is not needed and a MCU is good enough.

A SBC is typically needed when you want a USB 3 interface or an SSD, because extremely few MCUs have any peripheral interface faster than 1 Gb/s Ethernet.
I think in this case it’s reasonable for us to expect that they are doing what they should be doing.
You know what, I'm sorry, it was polyfill.io, not an NPM package.
It seems like you’ve never worked with critical infra. Most of it runs on 6 to 10 year old unpatched versions of Windows…
Hey author here :)

Happy to answer any questions.
Ask HN: How to finish last 30% of a side project?
I'm building a small project for myself, a web page editor. There's a frontend framework, an editor, and a backend. The first few months of the project went great and I was a blitz of productivity. Now there's only a few features left I want to build, yet writing the tests for these and going back and forth on different decisions has killed all productivity and drive within me.

I have tests but changing existing behaviors feels exhausting. Even a small refactor, even with good tests in place, feels exhausting and I just don't want to pick this up anymore.

Part of it feels like I've tried to do too much at once instead of building piece by piece, but even building piece by piece doesn't work because at some point you realize a new feature requires you to revisit the architecture of a prior decision, and that just puts me off from ever picking it up again.

I'm tired, I'm exhausted, I want to finish, but this is a recurring problem for every project I start. It just feels like I'm unable to ever find a way to wrap things up and I'm always working in a spiraling circle instead of the meme about drawing a wolf with some circles, add some details, etc.

Is there a book or article one recommends? It feels like I never learned how to code properly, even though I've been coding professionally over 10 years.
I love Dirksen, and a very similar channel on YT is called Exploring Alternatives

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8EQAfueDGNeqb1ALm0LjHA
“So we've got this CNC controller written in Rust from 2036, and, ah, here is a GUI for something like that written in late 90's Visual Basic 6… Just combine those and…”

“So uhm, you do know what you are doing, right?”

“Sir! I am a programmer-acheologist! Oh this is fascinating… Hold on, I must unearth and preserve this beauty of a BAT-file before we can go any further.”
More secure OSes would consider an application being able to take down the entire OS as a security issue and would make that impossible.
I'd hate to be on Microsoft's teams today. They're catching a lot of stray blame for this in the public eye where it's entirely not their fault.
I was thinking, this doesn't seem like its a case of all these machines still on an old version of windows, or some specific version, that is having issues. Therefore QA just missed one particular variant in their smoke testing. It seems like its every windows instance with that software, so either they don't have basic automated testing, or someone pushed this outside of a normal process.
Show HN: Prank your friends with Opengraph previews
I made a website that lets you create fake Opengraph previews and send them to friends.

I've been having a lot of fun with sending fake previews to friends so thought I'd share it with the community.

Tech stack is just NextJS + Supabase
YMMV -- I was a little creeped out by a blog that required my name, so I put a fake name. It was an extra level of indirection I could have done without.
If you click through to sign up, there is a notice that it is for official use only (FOUO).
One does not get Newton by adding more epicycles.
>These fines cause people to reoffend to get the money to pay them,

Sending them to prison causes them to reoffend as shown by the recidivism rate of people based on how long they are in prison, as they learn to be better criminals while not learning skills to fit back into society, and as imprisonment creates a life changing stigma which negative impacts their lives. Perhaps instead of criticizing fines, you should criticize imprisonment and even the act of convicting them that creates the stigma that makes gainful legal employment so hard to find.
Very interesting, very impressive, and a little concerning that this is what it takes to get noticed! I actually went in expecting something along the lines of "I started a profitable company in order to pad my resume and get some interviews; it worked, so now I can shut the company down."
It's like when you are using Wiz. You give your most secret files to former Israeli intelligence officers, and hope for the best.

It doesn't really make your data "more secure" or "private".
This is amazing sales tactics! So, you buddy up with insurance, they create a checkbox and recommend you for a revenue cut! Now you suddenly have millions of customers out of nowhere and your product gets installed on billions computers before you even know it. I have seen this tactic get used for many mediocre products. For example, 3rd party dishwasher soap recommended by dishwasher company. Amazingly powerful. I don’t think most of CrowdStrike employees even knew they were in more than billion computers with paid service. The CEO was just busy doing brutal marketing of this pointless product.
Rootkit means Crowdstrike literally intercepts commands before they can be executed in the CPU. It is like letting a third party implant a chip in your brain. If the chip thinks the command in your head is malicious, it will stop your brain from ever receiving the command.
Thanks for the heads-up, I was not aware of this.
Fair enough and I've been out of IT for a while. I wish I was still in it though, I'd love to be working on this!
Total tangent, but is that because of the wavelengths involved? I imagine a “sound camera” would have to be huge to avoid diffraction (but that’s just intuition), requiring impracticality large ears. Likewise i imagine that perceiving “chords” of light requires sensing on really tiny scales, requiring impractically small complex structure in the eyes?

Anybody know the answer?
> Would it happen on Linux?

It absolutely would. Windows is way ahead in terms of driver isolation and stability. Most drivers cannot bring down the system (your GPU driver can crash, your screen will flicker and maybe apps that were using it will crash, but the system recovers). Not so on Linux unfortunately, any driver will bring the system down.

More recently certain class of drivers have been making use of ebpf or virt2, which helps in isolating the driver. But I know for a fact that CS on Linux is as low level as it can be.

So long story short only MacOS is resistant to this, because they've simply deprecated any third party kernel extensions/modules.
I agree. I've only been using Mint for a few months but I really don't like this redesign either. Everything looks so flat and empty. I think the logo is extremely boring and bland.

I'm not very invested in my installation. I would probably use something else if this was the design instead of having to install a better looking UI.
Nothing at all.

He will be the guy that convinced the investors and stakeholders to pour more money into the company despite some world-wide incident.

He deserves at least 3x the pay.

PS: look at the stocks! They sank, and now they are gaining again value. People can't work, people die, flights get delayed/canceled because of their software.
US will fall behind in the AI race without natural gas: Williams Companies CEO
Yes! I mostly used it for transactional emails but it does also work for newsletters too! You can even add some personalization based on the recipient in React, which traditional drag-and-drop email builder won't be able to easily do.

But if your newsletter is totally static, beehiv / substack might be easier.
technically no os requires such software, it's people who make a decision to run it

Someone in comments described crowd strike bringing down their fleet of Linux servers in April
There are indeed honest people in the world.

Imagine the sense of personal satisfaction if you are able to do a deed like that.

It has happened twice in my life:

I left the bank one day after drawing out £1000, about a 100M down the street and a woman tapped me on the shoulder and said "Excuse me you have just dropped this?". amazing!

another time I had just filled up with petrol. Got to my front door and realised that I had left my wallet on the roof of my car after arguing with trouble. Money, credit cards, driving licence everything! I flew back to the petrol station and it was nowhere to be seen.

I went home dejected. An hour later my phone rang. It was the local police, they said someone had handed in my wallet to the station and did I want to pop along and pick it up. The police officer said that she had asked that I call her to thank her. Too right I did.
Not at all like insurance, because they don’t have to pay out at all when things go wrong.
Unfortunately no. The GAN always need to be in balance and contention with the generator. You can swap out the discriminator later, but you also got to make sure your discriminator is able to identify these errors. And ML models aren't the best at noticing small details. And since they too don't understand physics, there is no reason to believe that they will encode such information, despite every image in real life requiring consistency. Also remember that there is a learning trajectory, and most certainly these small details are not learned early on in networks. The problem is that this information is post hoc trivial to identify errors, but it isn't a priori. It is also easy for you because you know physics innately and can formulate causal explanations.
Thinking like this is how we end up with gadgets that can be barely be called pocket computers.

Thank God that the computer industry came of age before iOSsification began. Need to connect to wired headphones? Buy a dongle. Need more storage? Pay for iCloud. Want to program on your iPad? Jump through a million hoops and end up using a remote desktop solution.
See also hosted VPN companies
I ran an AB test on 2012 not sure its relevant now, we tested the McAfee logo and conversion was boosted by 2%. Bigger boost was a lock icon, 3%. It kept increasing the more locks we added an topped at 5% after 5 lock icons.
Previously (November 4, 2021 — 319 points, 281 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29106159