skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like it. Or at least I like flying to Lisbon for £40 return.

I've never been treated like a subhuman on Ryanair. I have been treated like cattle.
Out of use? Databricks is like 40 billion dollar company providing basically "managed Spark" platform.
Why can't SaaS implement a proper throttle after quota is exhausted?
If customer sees value, customer can pay to raise quota.

At least this used to be possible in most hosting plans in old days.
> Surely we can juice up a dead thumb to make it work, though, right?

At that point, it's probably easier to just clone the fingerprint and drape it over a purpose built prosthetic.
Silicon Valley Defense Group's NATSEC100
I love that it's so unreliably trustworthy that it winds up being, in a way, trustworthy.
Pardon my snarkiness but this is what you get when imbeciles MBAs and marketers run every company, not engineers.
Why are "security" patches not tested before they are deployed?
At 10:00AM PT: Author of ReFT: Representation Finetuning, at Oxen.ai Paper Club
Arxiv paper first author Zhengxuan Wu will join Greg Schoeninger on today's 10:00 AM Pacific Time Oxen.AI Paper Club. Topic: How editing representations can be better than Parameter-efficient finetuning (PEFT) methods. https://lu.ma/oxen

ReFT: Representation Finetuning for Language Models.

Greg, 3 questions, 1 comment from reading just the abstract.

What exactly is meant by a "representation"? i.e., what part of the neural network is captured by what this paper refers to as a representation?

What is meant by an intervention in "task specific intervention" ? I haven't heard that term before with pretraining or fine-tuning.

In API terms, would the point of this paper be like saying: "Instead of improving a RESTful API by improving the fidelity (depth) or breadth of sniff-able inputs and outputs, we will improve the API by directly changing the guts of the code for all existing inputs and outputs?"

Comment) The abstract makes this paper sound very voodoo. Hope testing was apples :: apples.

Look forward to your demystification on Friday, Greg. So cool that you have the paper's first author joining you to help explain and answer questions.

Deets:

https://lu.ma/oxen

Friday July 19, 10:00 AM Pacific, 1:00 PM Eastern Time on Zoom

Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.03592

Gratitude: Thank you Greg Schoeninger, Scott Howard
and the Oxen team for giving me an Easy button. You share your knowledge with the community while providing cool tools to curate datasets at oxen.ai.
First there are

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...

and related results that show there is not a procedure which can prove all true statements in logic + arithmetic, arithmetic matters of course because we need to handle dimensions, money, etc. This doesn't mean you can't solve the problem in front of you much of the time but it's not like a SQL server which has a definite algorithm to return all the answers all the time in a finite time.

Different variations of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_logic

covers a wide range of practical problems that turn up such as reasoning about other people's beliefs, about things that were true in the past or will be true in the future, things that are possible, things that are necessary, etc. People build modal logics that can handle one of these things but there is no "standard" that handles all of them.

Logical negation is tricky. You might know P or you might know ¬P but maybe you don't know anything about P. For some cases you want to query for "There is no evidence for P", other times you want to query for a solid "P". You definitely don't want a system that spends a lot of time enumerating all the things it can't prove though because that's endless

Reasoning over probability is essential in our imperfect world. You might think the system could store

P 80% probability
¬P 20% probability

but probabilities in the real world are conditional so it is maybe

P Q 10%
¬P Q 35%
P ¬Q 25%
¬P ¬Q 30%

which is not so bad but if you have hundreds of predicates the problem gets intractable but it's essential if you want to make a medical diagnosis, disambiguate the sense of a word, etc. (Note this problem relates to machine learning where it is all about learning a probability distribution, you can't get enough samples to measure every "cell" of the joint probability distribution, practical machine learning algorithms make good guesses)

There also is the problem of keeping the database consistent over time as it changes, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason_maintenance

There are a lot of answers to these problems that will please some people some of the time but there's nothing like the C programming language or Linux that anybody can pick up and start working with.
"Organic" Hydroponic Operations Allowed to Spray Glyphosate on the Soil
I don’t think people are saying that causing a boot loop is impossible on Linux, anyone who knows anything about the Linux kernel knows that it’s very possible.

Rather it’s that on Linux using such an invasive antiviral technique in Ring 0 is not necessary.

On Mac I’m fairly sure it is impossible for a third party to cause such a boot loop due to SIP and the deprecation of kexts.
Also Ryanair is the only thing keeping all the nationally subsidized airlines even somewhat honest when it comes to pricing. If they didn't exist, flying would be significantly more expensive. Glad they're here.
TBH I don't think many figures here make any financial sense -- but I gotta hold it if my friends all hold it. And once everyone holds it no one is allowed to mass sell it because it's going to hurt your friends, and in finance that's a sin.
I can't find who's the source on this. The best I can find is "people familiar with the investigation", but both the FBI and Cellebrite refused to comment on the story. This article quotes Bloomberg, which seems to be a copy of the Washington Post's article without all of the fluff.

I'm not surprised, there was a recent report that showed that Cellebrite can unlock any phone except for recent iOS and GrapheneOS. I'm just confused who "the people" that are being quoted everywhere are supposed to be.
However posting on reddit about it, would not be such a smart strategy. I think it's genuinely just a coincidence, WSB gets plenty of worthless "DD" posts every day that end up amounting to nothing.
I kind of think Mormons are the target audience for these products.
Good for profits, but it bet there are some employees who feel a distinct lack of joy about their work.
Florida is a special version of horrible when it comes to treatment of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. The citizens of Florida overwhelmingly voted to restore voting rights to people who had completed their sentence. Ron DeSantis and the Republicans modified the law to prevent people from voting if they hadn't paid all of their fees, which there is no central tracking or source of. They then went on to arrest Black citizens who tried to register to vote after their PO had told them they owed no money and were clear to vote.
ffplay?
>"If you were found guilty and sentenced to 5 years in prison, but were released after 1 month because your charge was overturned, you still have to pay the fee for the full 5 years you would have been there."

This is totally disgusting. But I guess they need underclass of slaves. Fucking piece of trash.
It is difficult because having attendants print boarding cards or working with an airport to maintain ticket printers costs money that eats into their margins and increases prices. It's not like they don't warn you that checking in at the airport is paid. I'd much rather save 1€ and check in the way I usually would, even if it means someone who can't read a few warnings has to pay a fee.
It might be the most awesome software in the world, but if I can't read the majority of bug reports, it's not something I can feel comfortable using.

(This is not a flaw in the software, this is a flaw in me: I don't know how to read -- I'm assuming it's Mandarin Chinese, but I can't even reliably tell that.)
I've been using this technique for some time now and it has been working really well.
IME, Boomer managers refuse to use anything but Windows. We have a few more years of this.
One reason being that Microsoft lobby hard against low-end PC & notebooks that are not aligned with its interests. [1]

Microsoft has a large, entrenched distribution network and market all over the world. It makes an uphill battle to create low-end programs for schools, universities, governments, SMBs.

Hence the phrase "no one was ever fired from buying Microsoft". It's too hard a battle to go against the flow.

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/microsofts-dra...
> No, we expect phone locking to work, even against state actors

But that's an unreasonable expectation because software is universally such garbage. Some is just less garbage than others.

State actors have the resources to find the holes in anything that isn't utterly perfect.
I have not heard about that one before, and it's gross. It sounds like Illinois and New Hampshire had similar things with their prison system, but outlawed it into 2019.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/amer...
Is it bad that all these patterns seem pretty normal to me?

Though I think that last one was pretty ingenious — when they listed the price of the cheapest option as $78.76 but compared it to the markup of the other pricier options as $28.21, $37.81 etc.
Hubris. Clearly they have no form of internal testing for updates because this should have been caught immediately.
From the BBC:

"The problems have emerged across the world, but was first noticed in Australia, and possibly felt most severely in the air travel industry.

There are delays at UK airports, with long queues reported at London's Stansted and Gatwick.

Ryanair said it had been "forced to cancel a small number of flights today (19 July)" and advised passengers to log-on to their Ryanair account, once it was back online, to see what their options are.

British Airways also cancelled several flights.

Several US airlines, notably United, Delta and American Airlines, grounded their flights around the globe. Australian carriers Virgin Australia and Jetstar also had to delay or cancel flights as departure screens went blank at Sydney airport.

Airports in Tokyo, Amsterdam and Delhi also said services had been affected.

Meanwhile, the problems have also hit trains, payment systems and healthcare providers.

UK railway companies reported delays and said they were experiencing "widespread IT issues".

Payment systems - many shops could only take cash. In the UK, supermarkets including Morrisons and Waitrose spent the morning unable to accept contactless payments. It was the same in Australian supermarkets including Woolworths and Coles, while financial institutions such as the National Australia Bank were also affected.

Healthcare - Israel said 15 hospitals had switched to manual processes, although this did not affect medical treatment. Ambulances were told to take new cases to other hospitals. In the UK, some doctors' surgeries in England reported issues with booking appointments.

As the full extent of the disruption became clear, more firms and institutions started reporting problems.

The US state of Alaska warned that its emergency services were affected.

Broadcasters were also caught up in the chaos, including Sky News in the UK, which spent several hours off air.

The London Stock Exchange said it was working as normal, but there were issues with its news service, used by companies to report market-sensitive information in a timely way.

And Poland’s largest container terminal, the Baltic Hub in the northern city of Gdansk, said the outage was "hampering terminal operations" and asked companies not to send containers to the port."
Unfortunately Ryanair left Frankfurt Airport. They consistently offered flights an order of magnitude cheaper than other airlines and I could reach Frankfurt airport directly by bus for free with my student ticket. This was the ideal way to go on vacation for me. I don't mind clicking "no thanks" a few times when it saves me 500 euros.
The issue with Crowdstrike on Linux did not cause widespread failures, so its clear that the majority of enterprises that do run their servers on Linux were not affected. They were invulnerable because they do not need Crowdstrike or similar.

Linux (or BSD) servers do not usually require third party kernel modules. Linux desktops might have the odd video driver or similar.
USGS National Water Dashboard
“One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
I'm happy about it, but agency regulations like this are notoriously flimsy and prone to overturn by administrative changes.
Unbelievable! Is there no constitutional protection against that?
What you describe is not normal today (unless we are talking about some Mukhosransk type of cities), and certainly was not normal in USSR, which kept civil infrastructure in a good shape.

As someone who is currently living in Central Asia, yes I do have no water for two weeks a year, they switch it off for "maintenance". However all last 5+ years, I had water through summer, with only occasional failures. We did have no heating one year, but water was all the time present.
Long time ago I was working for a web hoster, and had to help customers operating web shops to pass audits required for credit card processing.

Doing so regularly involved allowing additonal ciphers for SSL we deemed insecure, and undoing other configurations for hardening the system. Arguing about it is pointless - either you make your system more insecure, or you don't pass the audit. Typically we ended up configuring it in a way that we can easily toggle those two states, and reverted it back to a secure configuration once the customer got their certificate, and flipped it back to insecure when it was time to reapply for the certification.
This will go down as one of the worst examples of communication during an outage.
Funnily enough the buses/taxis/trains page in the checkout does actually hold a brilliant deal. You can get a National Express coach return to/from Stansted for about half the price that they sell it for on their own website, and it's needed too because Stansted Express trains are a ridiculously expensive monopoly.
It's easy to blame CrodStrike because they're the ones to blame here. They lit a billion system32 folders on fire with an untested product and push out fear mongering corny marketing material. Turns out you should be afraid.
A colleague showed me their Caterpillar-branded phone, it was proper ruggedized like you see in construction radios and the like, big bumpers, plastic screen, he casually yote it onto the floor to demonstrate. Mainly so he can pass it to his kids if they're bored.

The current generation Cat branded phones look pretty regular, but are probably still much more rugged than most phones.
Hmm, maybe they've migrated their systems? I know SK had a plan to migrate govt machines to Linux.
Or you're a pentester playing 4D chess with your comment.

Or a CS salesperson playing 3D chess with your comment.

If so, well played!
> Legally, I think somewhere in their license it says is that they're not responsible in any way or form if their software malfunctions in any way.

I really should add this to my resume and see if it’ll work.
Legit question, not trolling. Android is the next biggest OS used to run a single application like POS, meter readers, digital menus, navigation systems. It might be the top one by now. It's prone to all the same 'spyware' drawbacks and easier to set up than "Linux".
Or just use conventional algorithm, since the fix is about formal physics. Although it will not be a true 100% fix, it could be good enough to make this test rather useless, because even now:

> "There are false positives and false negatives..."
Word and PowerPoint are disposable. Pages and Keynote work just fine. Excel on the Mac is perfectly fine.

But that aside — Excel is a single application. That one app doesn’t determine an entire Corporate IT strategy.
> You'd think that competition would foster better correction facilities

Why would you think that? It's not like consumers get to pick their prisons.
Switching off inflammatory protein leads to longer, healthier lifespans in mice
Wasn't arguing it did. It was a genuine question about the defaults.

When I was younger I just didn't understand how a company could legally embargo publishing benchmarks for their software.

After being in the industry for 15+ years now though, I get it (thought I still don't like the fact that it curtails speech). I've seen so many poorly setup benchmarks that either lack rigor, or are designed to show one result in the best light, not really caring about the configuration of the other options.

Benchmarks are hard, and even trying to do them properly it is easy to miss something.

I took nothing at all away from this article, because it was clearly a poorly constructed test. The data is junk, I should ignore the noise.
Other airlines add excessive charges too, they just put it in the face value of the fare.
The difference is that i van easily rollback a linux system, a complete update too, nota on windows
How is this update released at all? Something that affects literally every machine does not get caught in testing? From a 80B company no less.
This is a local startup in my hometown, I have been following them for 4 years or so, and have met the founders on several occasions. Decided to pull the trigger on a reservation for a seat for ~2028 flight. Excited to keep tabs on their progress.
Pretty standard in enterprise b2b, most of the sales cycle is in contracts
You raise a fair point. Here's the Act [1] and 47 USC 276 [2] in full, (b)(1)(A) (emphasis added):

> (A)establish a compensation plan to ensure that all payphone service providers are fairly compensated, and all rates and charges are just and reasonable, for completed intrastate and interstate communications using their payphone or other calling device, except that emergency calls and telecommunications relay service calls for hearing disabled individuals shall not be subject to such compensation;

What does "just and reasonable" mean? With Chevron deference, courts would have to defer to the FCC on this. Now they don't.

Now Chevron deference is a bigger issue when laws are written more broadly and vaguely like "the EPA should ensure the air is clean". We had 40 years of Congress over multiple administrations deliberately writing laws to defer to Federal agencies.

But a prison telco could still bring suit arguing the rates are not "just and reasonable".

[1]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/154...

[2]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/276
That's funny, because IIRC McAfee back in the Windows XP days did this exact same thing! They added a system file to the signature registry and caused Windows computers to BSOD on boot.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/defective-mcafee-update-causes...
Yes, I have put Fastly in front of it to drastically reduce costs.
But if you leave your phone at home only on the days you commit crimes, it's a problem too. This was used in the past to identify people.
>Windows actually is better suited for that, because it's designed to constrain and control users. Linux is designed for the smart user to be able to do whatever they want, which includes working around stupid IT policies and corporate malware.

This just tells me you don't know linux. Linux can be much more easily hardened and restricted than windows. It's trivial to make it so that a user can only install whitelisted software from private repos.
A bit of Googling turned up stories about the high cost of phone calls for prisoners in France, Germany, and the UK and that their systems are run by private companies.

I couldn't find out of the money goes "straight through" to the phone system provider or if the government collects and forwards it, but does that really make a difference?
DOAH!
...I was saying, I tried to learn some useful Calculus back when I was doing Macromedia Flash a hundred years ago, and just could not get through it using academic resources. Too generic.

Fast forward and I came back to math for Python projects. And by this time youtube and authors like Khan Academy are making learning materials which let you enter in the middle and work your way in whichever direction suits your goals.

But what changed me from "I'm not good at math, so I hate math" to loving it was history of mathematics--the stories of the really interesting problems, and insights into the structure, theories of mathematics. I stopped thinking of math as a black box, and started to see its beauty and simplicity.
Yet Lennart Pottering and Redhat (spelled that way as I am one of the original pre-IPO investor of RedHat via Alex Brown/Deutsche Bank) wants to put networking of Linux into UEFI this quarter, inside the most sacrosanct PID 1.

They still won’t learning anything from Crowdstrike’s mistakeS!

Maybe it is time for me to ditch that stock.
This is vendor lock-in 101 unfortunately, and why I've always steered clear of VC-backed companies that offer "all-in-one" solutions that can't be migrated easily. Another company that does something similar (builds WYSIWYG landing pages with marketing analytics) is Unbounce, and they jacked up their prices too, but not to this level.

It was clear from Day 1 that Webflow's webpage building software with HTML export was a trial run for a hosted CMS. That's how they get ya.
I'm a die hard FOSS guy, but as someone who has done LDAP work with FreeIPA and OpenLDAP -- AD does a better job.

Admittidly, it's mostly a better job at integrating with Microsoft-powered systems, so it should damn well do a better job, but it's a core business offering and has polish on it in ways that many FOSS offerings don't.

disclaimer: haven't done FreeIPA and LDAP work in the last ~3 years, maybe they got better.
> If they can crack his phone they can crack your phone.

And not just them, anyone with access (legal or otherwise) to these tools can.
A key part of breach a network is having a beacon running on their networks, and communicating out, one way or another.

Running beacons with good EDRs is difficult, and has become the most challenging aspect of most red team engagements because of that.

No EDR, everything becomes suddenly super easy.
Numeric pin? Seems like fingerprints on the glass alone would make a shorter numeric pin trivial to crack.

I'm just thinking of all the other weak security systems like garage door keypads where the code is derived from the more worn buttons. Or cleaning/dusting an ATM keypad before someone enters their code and then carefully examining the buttons afterwards.

But who knows — perhaps people have completely munged up their displays making fingerprinting useless.
Ironic that the software intended to prevent exactly these kinds of outages ends up causing it.
Good call — it would be inconvenient to run a country in 2025 otherwise.
The "publish to your own server" is a cruel joke. Anything remotely dynamic, even things like CMS pages that can be generated at build time, don't work. To be fair, webflow itself is a joke.
This is amplified by the fact that many of those SaaS are startup and privately financed. They are living on borrowed money, and if the money dry up, they will need to move to a viable business model, that is, charging the consumer the real cost.