skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> the experience for managing any content bought/downloaded from outside Amazon is almost unusable

Not at all.

I buy EPUBs from all kinds of vendors, across multiple languages. I also have many downloaded from Standard Ebooks [0].

All EPUB works fine, and provides great experience- as long as a file does not contain one of the following- custom page illustrations, syntax highlighted code, graphs, charts, maps, math equations, color comicstrip etc.

Just use PDF in tablet or laptop for arxiv papers, math/programming books, etc.

Use Kindle for recreational reading- like novels, poetry, essays, etc. I am a huge fan of reading since basically learning to read. And I love Kindle! Am a user for last ~10 years.

[0]: https://standardebooks.org
I sure hope the future is more like Svelte, HTMX, and Astro.
Ask HN: About being something else than IC or middle manager
I've noticed a curious pattern. LinkedIn and Slack profile pictures of VPs, CTOs, upper management, and basically anyone who's not an IC (a senior software engineer like me) or a middle engineering manager share one thing in common:

They are "serious" pictures, typically taken from the front and looking very professional. They are wearing at least a shirt, avoiding hoodies or similar casual clothes. They transmit "professionalism".

I lack this. It's not that I cannot wear shirts or similar clothing; it's just that I don't want to transmit "professionalism" merely through my profile picture. The problem I see is that if your profile/CV has a less-than-adequate picture, it's likely it will be rejected.

This probably doesn't apply to FAANG companies (the best counterexample is probably Peter Norvig and his hawaiian shirts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Norvig)
Virtually all banks in Prague offer this (extremely expensive) convenience.

What pisses me even more off is that most ATMs charge an additional fee for their usage. The exception being KB (Societe Generale) and Raiffeisenbank.
Doesn't the linked post answer your question in the first few sentences?
Most banks charge a lot less for their customers. In this era of debit/credit cards that convert automatically, offering to do a currency conversion at a higher fee than basically any bank, and relying on customers to be not savvy enough to know that is scammy.
I hope Steve1989 reviews one of these.

For those who don't know, Steve reviews (mostly military) rations, all the way from before the first world war to modern day. One of my favorite channels on Youtube.
This is what happens when you entrust software security to ex-hackers. Hackers love complexity because that's the kind of environment they thrive in; yet when they start working for the other side as security consultants, they still love complexity. Complexity ought to be the security consultant's worst enemy.

Ex-hackers often talk about security as if it's something you need to add to your systems... Security is achieved through good software development practices and it's about minimalism. You can't take intrinsically crappy, over-engineered, complex software and make it more secure by adding layers upon layer of complex security software on top.
I know 100k+ engineers (some in security) that definitely should not be described as skilled.
Not the same poster, but one phase of a typical attack inside a corporate network is lateral movement. You find creds on one system and want to use them to log on to a second system. Often, these creds have administrative privileges on the second system. No vulnerabilities are necessary to perform lateral movement.

Just as an example: you use a mechanism similar to psexec to execute commands on the remote system using the SMB service. If the remote system has a capable EDR, it will shut that down and report the system from which the connection came from to the SOC, perhaps automatically isolate it. If it doesn't, an attacker moves laterally through your entire network with ease in no time until they have domain admin privs.
It's a bit like asking, why don't they do math like Euler anymore?

we haven't exhausted the Bach we have. It's a lifetime's work just to study and appreciate it all. There are composers who have written great homages, my current favorite is Agustin Barrios' "La Cathedral," second movement (https://youtu.be/dmc6KV0_UVM?t=271), which has most of the elements of one of Bach's preludes.

It begs the question of what would it even mean to compose like that? You can't reproduce it with fractals or anything procedural. You might be able to use AI to imitate it, but each voice is a distinct set of musical ideas and someone has to have those to write them. The start would be to just start doing arrangements of his work to begin to understand them. It's a different relationship to music, where it doesn't bear imitation.
> Apple has done a much better job with macOS in terms of security and performance.

Do not underestimate corporate IT's ability to slow down Macs with endpoint security software.
That approach only makes sense if trusted inputs are tested
It rings a bit false when juxtaposed with their $40b spend on the Metaverse…where was the savvy leveraging of the open source community then?

Meanwhile Meta’s competitors commoditise and glean profits from actually-SOTA LLM offerings.

In any case, their hypothesis is testable: which open source innovations from Llama1/2 informed Llama3?
Don't wait too long, though.
I used to apply the same tactic, but once I missed the deadline by 5 minutes and had to pay €55 per person for check-in at the counter.
Ideally there would be a usable security first os based on something like sel4 with a declarative package system for slow to change mission critical appliances.
No the hashes are the same.

There are different files that can differ between customers.

9ca565965198cf1a5073ce974c5826d14aa3ac3cf574b3d2d2e7f80624b9ed90 = C-00000291-00000000-00000033.sys = https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/9ca565965198cf1a5073ce97...

61486fe1aa690260bd846245f0fac204b26f41ed83f66e962cb548837f3ceb98 = C-00000291-00000000-00000057.sys = https://www.virustotal.com/gui/search/61486fe1aa690260bd8462...
I think you represent the schism in your own post. Retail is hyper focused on the name Microsoft and Windows. But the enterprise and technical people are focused on rolling back a bad CrowdStrike bad update. They will spend hours and even days focusing on doing that, asking why they were vulnerable to such an update and what they should have done to avert being vulnerable to a bad update.

And for them it will be a bit of a stretch to say Microsoft should have stopped us deploying CrowdStrike. I’m sure Microsoft would love to do just that and sell its own Microsoft Solution.

Now if enterprises decide to run only Linux, BSD, or MacOS would they have been invulnerable to a bad CrowdStrike update: https://www.google.com/search?q=crowdstrike+kernel+panic

No so your entire premis is fully invalidated by a single google search.

On the other had I do feel Microsoft does have life far too easy in so many enterprises, but the fault here lies as much with the competition.
The SolarWinds stock has never recovered from its high before the hack. And it is on a downward trend.
Office. The entire world runs on Excel, Word and Powerpoint. Unfortunately.
Beautiful story, thanks for the link.
As I posted elsewhere, the SolarWinds stock has never recovered from its high before the hack. And it is on a downward trend.
What makes you think the FAANG companies don't use windows? Spent four years at Amazon recently and unless you were a dev, you were more likely to have a windows PC than Mac. Saw zero Linux laptops.
I dont think you can hold Microsoft liable for 3rd party software pushing its own update. Microsoft didn't make anyone install Crowdstrike or it's update files.
Not all of them but I have flown between destinations for 10€ shortly after Covid that were easily between 300-400€ on old-school airlines 15 years ago. While those are exceptions there are cases where budget airlines even with all the bells and whistles are still substantially cheaper than legacy carriers.
Because there is software that runs only on certain OSes, and not others.
That's somewhat reassuring...

but it would feel much better if you followed up with "and this is <insert reason> why the law is so clear-cut that the decision by the FTC cannot be seen as inventing regulation and so nobody will litigate much less win in court against the FTC".
Plants might not hold on to carbon as long as we thought
Isn't it easier to simply look for all the 6 fingered hands?
This is how I would start a war… surreal.

I hope it’s just a bug.
Excel. There is no other software that can currently fill excel’s role in business. It’s the best at what it does and what it does is usually very important. Unfortunately.
> 1. Risk: low (so few companies get hacked)

I wonder how much that's still true now that ransomware has apparently become viable.

Finding an insecure target, setup the data hostage situation, have the victim come to pay is scalable and could work in volume. If getting small money from a range of small targets becomes profitable, small fishes will bear sinilar risks to juicier targets.
I hate dark patterns like everybody else, but I have to say that - despite those - the Ryanair website still seems to me one of the best ones for booking a flight.

It might be because I got accustomed to it, but - while you indeed need to decline extra after extra - the overall process seems sufficiently clear and straightforward, and most of all both the website and the app are quick and bug-free (in my experience).

Other airline websites I've used in comparison are much much worse. Finnair, SAS, Swiss (Lufthansa), EasyJet, AirBaltic, LOT... much slower, clunkier, and buggier. (Again, in my experience.)

As for the actual experience of flying with them, of course it's not luxurious, and you need to accept that strictly enforcing their rules is how they can keep their prices down. So I'll go against the grain and say that I have no sympathy for the people that show up at the gate with two oversized bags and make a scene because they're asked to pay for them.
(they confirmed there was no hack)
I think you have too much faith in minimal software development practices being applied at companies.
I feel Windows is wrongly blamed here it's just an OS.

If you rely on your applications to be available you should have disaster recovery plans for scenarios like this.
>Apple has done a much better job with macOS in terms of security and performance.

I really like their corporate IT products that are going to push MS out as you say. I particularly love iActive Directory, iExchange, iSQLserver, iDynamics ERP, iTeams. Apples office products are the reason noone uses Excel any more. Their integration with their corporate cloud, iAzure is amazing. I love their server products in particular, it being so easy to spin up an ios server and have dfs filesharing, dns etc is great. MS must be quaking in their shoes
Honestly, windows out of the box is pretty secure. I don't want to defend Microsoft here, but adding third party security to Windows hasn't been anything but regulatory compliance at best and cargo culting at worst for over a decade now. If you actually look at core windows exploits compared to market share, they're comparable to Apple. Enterprises insist on adding extra attack surface area in the name of security.

I agree that people who actually know what they're doing are generally running Linux backends, but Microsoft have enterprise sewn up, and this attack is not their fault.
is there an iPhone version of this? custom keyboard?
The toilet charge is (and it should be obvious) a marketing ploy — it gets the Ryanair boss interviews in the media, and reminds people that Ryanair is so cheap it's not worth checking the competitors.
I agree 100%.

The first time I used it, I paid in the airport for the boarding pass.
When I complained that I never paid for in other airline companies, I was told I did not have to pay for it if I read the email they sent me to print it 2 hours in advance.

But I received tons of emails from Ryanair every week before the flight. Advertisement emails which, at some point, I got tired of and stopped reading them: that's how I missed the email in which they asked me to print the boarding pass.

Not to mention that the paragraph in which they mentioned the boarding pass was itself a small portion of a larger advertisement email I still keep in my email inbox.
It's because of two things:

1. Users are more comfortable running Windows and Office because it's Windows they likely used in school and on personal laptops.

2. This is the biggie: Microsoft's enterprise services for managing fleets of workstations are actually really good -- or at least a massive step up from the competition. Linux (and it's ilk) is much better for managing fleets of servers, but workstations require a whole different type of tooling. And once you have AD and it's ilk running and thus Windows administrators hired, it's often easier to run other services from Windows too, rather than having to spin up another cluster of management services.

Software focused businesses generally start out with engineers running macOS or Linux, so they wouldn't have Windows management services pre-provisioned. And that's why you generally see them utilising stuff like Okta or Google Workspace
We're stuck with metaphors for human behavior because the way LLMs operate is so alien and counterintuitive, yet similar enough to human behavior, that we haven't yet developed suitable language to describe it. "Hallucination" gets the point across in general terms, at least.
I'm puzzled by the downvotes. Am I saying something obscene or against the rules of polite discourse? I mean, I could be wrong sure but I don't think downvotes are for disagreeing with what somebody says but for punishing behavior that lowers the standards of the forum. Am I really doing that with this comment? Do I need to cite all the articles and books I read to form this opinion or else I cannot state an opinion?
The average Ryanair fare is €27 (1).

In 1990, Aer Lingus began "special reduced" fares for Dublin-London at IR £199 or €252 in 1990 money or €531 accounting for inflation. Today that's available from €15 with Ryanair, a reduction of 97%. Not quite two orders of magnitude, but not far off either.

The same story plays out on every legacy city pair, but when you start to include smaller cities which prior to Ryanair never had direct flights to anywhere other than their regional hub (if that), then the price difference can be closer to three orders of magnitude.

Overall, I think you and the other commenter are seriously underestimating the effect that Ryanair had on the European aviation.

(1): https://www.statista.com/statistics/1125265/average-ticket-p...
I had to second guess myself because I don’t know if I really know what cultured means, but Apparently the dictionary definition of the word cultured is “produced under artificial conditions” so I would say I agree with you. Can’t argue with refined. Probably won’t reasonably argue with intellectual, but then again I think I don’t know that I think that I get into art for intellectual reasons exactly, I would describe them as spiritual reasons.
> (OK, there was Smalltalk. Let's ignore Smalltalk. Lord knows everyone else did.)

As someone that used Smalltalk/V on Windows 3.x, was aware of Smalltalk role on OS/2 and SOM, alongside the whole Visual Age line of products before Sun coming up with Java, there were enough people looking around Smalltalk until 1996.
Recently I booked a ticket on Ryanair. To validate my account I had to turn on my camera, hold my ID card, then do a bunch of things the machine asked me, like spin my head to the left, etc. Next-level reverse-Turing test there. It really felt like my computer-master was making fun of me by giving me silly instructions. Computers were a mistake, I guess.
> they have a dedicated team of engineers working the problem and can deliver a solution.

No. Can merely facilitate the customer's on-site admin to deliver a solution.
yeah, “chevron deference” was only really an issue with ambiguously written laws IMO, or agencies taking an overly expansive view of their authority. And they still can, but now those decisions can be challenged in court.

good summary here: https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/chevron-is-out-of-gas-wil...
Fun fact, these negative value garbage offerings are often “required” by box checking certifications like SOC2.
Sure, if you have massive staffing to handle compliance you might be able to argue you’ve achieved the objective without this trash. The rest of us are just shrug and do it.

Some of the “compliance managers as a service” push you in this direction as well.
Interesting. Apparently, I have much to learn.
What defaults would those be, and how would you change them?
1. The government decides that prisoners can make phone calls, but they can only use a single prison-approved phone operator, and that operator is a private company.

2. The private company realizes it has no competition, raises prices as much as it wants.

3. The government is surprised with the outcome.

I would say the government is at fault here for prohibiting competition, not the companies.

It's the 21st century, you could establish a system where any company, with an appropriate license and government approval, could offer tablets / cell phones for prisoner use, with appropriate limitations and restrictions placed on them of course. Prisoners could then choose which company they want to go with. That would instantly eliminate the problem.
Solzhenitsyn Warned Us
Rust is getting support for NuttX
https://archive.ph/pZ0Mx
Privatizing the social correction sector is a joke of really bad taste. Incentives are exactly like that, to increase recidivism and not actually re-socialize inmates.

You'd think that competition would foster better correction facilities, but as with big pharma, being effective is counterproductive because it hinders growth, which is at the core of capitalism.

Not saying competition is bad, only that it's maybe not universally applicable to all areas.
Link: https://github.com/soupslurpr/Transcribro/issues/9
People who know how to make money pass this knowledge on to their kids. People who don't, can't. This shouldn't be surprising.
did you really just say windows is secure out of the box?
Ultimately I believe it will be enforced, and then potentially challenged in court. This seems to be the path for most regulation in the USA. So the question always is "Who will challenge this?" because as you point out, it has become easier for challenges to regulations to succeed (at least in theory).
Microsoft update causes chaos with transport, banks and businesses
My mind went to the novel "Time Pressure" by Spider Robinson (ISBN-10 ‎ 0441809332). It's worth reading, if you like sci-fi.
CrowdStrike has various auto update policies, including not to automatically update to the latest version, but to the latest version -1 or even -2. Customers with those two policies are also impacted.
I don’t have a Windows setup, let alone one with CrowdStrike installed, but for this, you have to be in recovery mode to boot, not necessarily to be able to delete that file. For that, admin access may be enough.
At the equivalent of $8 for a days of food, this actually wouldn't be too bad of a deal just for day to day use.

However, I imagine eating highly preserved foods everyday wouldn't be good for you?
Oops, already posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41002195
Why does it make you more unsettled? The amount of parsers written in unsafe languages for difficult formats is immense. They're everywhere.
I've read your comment above and the one above that multiple times.

I still don't understand what you are asking.

If you don't understand that breeding something for a certain trait will impact that animal, I suggest you go look at pugs or dash-hounds and the medical problems they now have as a result of very specific breeding.
A textbook example is corporations that standardize on a single application or service across all infrastructure for a particular functionality.

Like, say, using CrowdStrike everywhere to secure all cloud workloads.
> Treating passengers in a respectable civilised manner should be a given

Then pay more for an airline that provides that.

The RyanAir deal is pretty straight-forward: you will be treated like subhuman cattle, and in exchange you will have very low prices. They optimize many things to save costs, including having less staff for things like printing boarding tickets. They're fairly up-front about it and in general it's a fair deal. Whether you personally like that deal is a different matter.
In any defense of Ryanair, it's an absolute given that someone will quote 10 EUR flights (it's always 10 EUR/GBP), as if it were the norm
Not really, with a little discipline it can work for the vast majority of scenarios. 90% of my flights are backpack only and that includes travel where I needed to be dressed formally and travel with my SO. The only scenarios where it's actually necessary I see is if you need health equipment (which most people don't), if you have toddlers (which I'd argue you shouldn't be flying with anyways), and if you are moving a lot of stuff (where paying for luggage is still cheaper than shipping in many cases).

It just requires a little planning which I think most people my generation and younger are getting used to.
"Too big to uninstall" is a thing I guess
So, if you buy a ticket (in a foreign currency) with RyanAir and you pay via PayPal, you'll need to choose NOT to use the currency converter twice!
> Yes, but that's not because of Windows itself (which is fast and secure out of the box)

I think what you're really saying is that a Windows system is secure until you apply power to the computer.
Funny story on this hidden paid verification Ryanair does.

This is the thing: https://www.ryanair.com/gb/en/lp/explore/verification-hub

Basically, you have to download a random third party app and provide some very sensitive data, including filming yourself.

I was once caught by this, even though I actually used Ryanair's site directly. My assumption is that it was due to a Cloudflare/VPN IP, so I might have looked like a bot.

I was pissed, more due to random third party app, vs 50 cents charge, so I decided to bluff and ping their support and start complaining.

I asked them to tell me exactly what caused my purchase to be tagged with this. I demanded I have the right to that data, and quoted things like GDPR and other consumer protection laws (e.g. hidden fees protections). After several layers of random agents sending me around, I got forwarded to some managers and folks with non-support titles (based on LinkedIn), as I kept pushing to get logs and details.

I wanted all data associated with this request, and all third parties that got access to my purchase details, quoting the part of ToS where I allowed for this...

Eventually, they admitted it's a vendor, they don't have details, and use a third party for detection. They said they have a whitelist and added my email to that whitelist so I never get miss-tagged as a bot.

I caved/sold out and didn't push further. I am still pretty annoyed that we are OK with companies doing this. (I understand I'm part of the problem as I ended up flying and only adding a bit of support load to their queue in the end)...
I was talking about malware signatures, which do necessarily use cryptographic hashes. They are probably more optimized for speed because the engine needs to check a huge number of files as fast as possible.
Crowdstrike and Microsoft: What we know about global IT outage
Good luck everyone. I just spent all night fixing my shit and we caught it early
Pretty much every airline overbooks?
Won't work on a deepfake of Count Rugen, for instance.
The AMD Zen 5 Microarchitecture
Very cool, great work!

If you don't mind sharing, how is this hosted?
A malware delivery platform sponsored by the US security state. All customers get customised versions nothing to see here.