skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Asking “why don't they compose music like Bach any more?” is like asking “why don’t they make smartphones like the original iPhone anymore?”.

Bach has certain appeal (to some—not every connoisseur of classical music is in love with it), and he’s certainly been a massive influence, but culture moves on. He was among the first to really get into harmonic modulation and a lot of other ideas—and composers have been exploring them and have since taken to new levels.

If everyone mimicked Bach, we would regress; and some do mimic Bach, as the post itself states in the first sentence. There seems to be little substance in asking this question (other than to advertise one’s preferences, perhaps).
> By contrast your ordinary python or VBA script should not be able to blue screen your machine, especially not during startup.

This is misleading. If you run a python or VBA script on startup with elevated permissions to e.g. setup a driver (with a bug) or do hardware configurations (in a way which doesn't work) then it will as much blue screen as a sys file.

The issue is not that it's a `.sys` file, but that a high privilege administrative task run at startup fails so hard that it blue screens.

(In windows the sys file extension is basically just a marker that the file is part of the "system" without being clear what it is, it can be anything from a data blob,over a data base, over python/VBA files to a device driver or a blob combining multiple of such things. They mostly contain device drivers and hardware configuration, but there are some which are basically just the equivalent of /etc/hostname)
How to build highly-debuggable C++ binaries
I was listening to Triple J (one of ABC's radio stations), they said: "welcome to our first and possibly last ever Triple J's USB Fridays, we can't play any of our usual music because the computers are all down, all we can play is the songs that happen to be on the USB stick that one of us had in our pocket". LOL!
A lot of active directory defaults are wildly insecure, even on a newly built domain, and there are a lot of active directory admins out there that don't know how to properly delegate as permissions.
Thanks for putting up the context. Thoughtful of you.
You think we can't generate a picture of a head facing sideways? Obviously incorrect.
And how many lifes lost?
Something to keep an eye on is that Whisper is strongly bound to processing a 30-second window at a time. So if you send it 30 seconds of audio, and it decodes it, then you send it another one second of audio, the only sensible way it can work is to have it reprocess seconds 2s-30s in addition to the new data at 31s. If there was a way to have it just process the update, then there's every possibility it could avoid a lot of work.

I suspect that's what people are getting at by saying it's "not streaming": it's built as a batch process but, under some circumstances, you can run it fast enough to get away with pretending that it isn't.
I’m glad classical music has done this for you. I’ve always heard of people appreciating the an ability of music to tell a story, and I’ve wondered if it would make my music better if I used a story as inspiration, and maybe this is the post modernist in me, but I’ve always appreciated music as a form that expressed something you couldn’t put into words, even as you’ve expressed here, the narrative is fairly simple, isn’t there a much richer je ne sais Quias or spirit behind the music? In which case I’ve never really gotten the richest version of that from classical.
Depend on which FAANG I guess. Approaching now 10y at Google and I saw Windows laptops only used by very few sales people. Everyone else is either using Macs or Chromebook.
I just flew aer lingus and ryanair and both charged you to pick seats - but we didn't pay. Both flights were almost empty. Aer lingus algorithm gave our party an empty row each. Ryanair algorithim put us sitting next to strangers, surrounded by empty rows/seats.
Sounds like people in some of these environments will be doing their level best to automate an appropriate fix.

Hopefully they have IPMI and remote booting of some form available for the majority of the affected boxes/VMs, as that could likely fix a large chunk of the problem.
You can get that on Mac right?
I definitely learned some cat facts. Reminds me of my first GeoCities site.
There's already somebody trying to cash in on this problem:

https://fix-crowdstrike-apocalypse.com
Because we don't listen to music the same way we listened in Bach's time.

The Italian movie director Frederico Fellini hated television because it destroyed the ceremony of movie theatres. He complained that before television watching movies was a ritual. People would program it in advance, invite friends, dress sharply, take hours to go downtown (no multiplexes back then) and discuss the movie at length with others. That's how you'd get dense movies like the ones from John Ford, Sergei Eisenstein, Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean.

When television came it banalized the experience. As Fellini said, people would watch movies in pyjamas while the dog was barking outside spoiling it all. True, after some time, television learned how to make solid drama (Sopranos, The Wire, etc). But that was just a glimpse, streaming will erase that.

Similarly, in Bach's time, music was rare and, because of that, meant to be transcendental, to be extraordinary and to be played in extraordinary gothic cathedrals, audiences expected it that way. And, btw, Bach-like music was extremely rare during baroque times. Apart from a few Italian and French composers, no one in the Baroque era did anything really remarkable.

Today, music is played on Spotify. It is cheap and discardable. Can't be Bach, will never be.

Edit: remember, the shift from Bach's standards began during his late years (1750). He was considered old-fashioned and his sons (Carl Philip Emanuel and Johan Christian) began composing in a style different from his father's. 3 crucial elements to understanding this change were the rise of a bourgeois class demanding entertainment, the growing market for concert halls and the industry of music publishing for private entertainment. This lead to the production of music more "accessible", simpler and easier to play. Mozart and Haydn were the new masters.
This isn't a Windows update (which absolutely does let you do blue/green deployments vis SUS), but rather a Crowdstrike update which also lets you stage rollouts and I expect several administrators are finding out why that is important.
More or less. You can set up some update policies which and apply those to subsets of your machines. You can disable updates during time blocks, or block them altogether. There's also the option of automatically installing the "n-1" update.

We run auto n-1 at work, but this also happened at the same time on my test machine with runs "auto n". It never happened before, so this looks like something different than the actual installed sensor version, especially since the latest version was released something like a week ago.
Which strikes me as an ingenious method of locking in their customers with a proprietary compressed format only their finetuned LLMs can parse.
Testing for most organizations is usually either really, incredibly expensive or an ineffective formality which leaves them at more risk than it saves. If you aren’t going to do a full run through all of your applications, it’s probably not doing much and very few places are going to invest the engineer time it takes to automate that.

What I take from this is that vendors need a LOT more investment in that work. They have both the money and are best positioned to do that testing since the incentives are aligned better for them than anyone else.

I’m also reminded of all of the nerd-rage over the years about Apple locking down kernel interfaces, or restricting FDE to their implementation, but it seems like anyone who wants to play at the system level needs a well-audited commitment to that level of rigorous testing. If the rumors of Crowdstrike blowing through their staging process are true, for example, that needs to be treated as seriously as browsers would treat a CA for failing to validate signing requests or storing the root keys on some developer’s workstation.
Wild that a piece of software so integral to basic function has such bad release discipline. A/B, Blue/Green, Canary, Rolling, etc..

I've worked on 4 person software teams that at least followed basic user group rolling release system.
I wonder if intel can handle a recall of a cpus with this issue.

Recall or not, their handling of this issue has been sub optimal to say the least.
> Crowdstrike is finished

Boeing is still there... we'll see
Well, they are relatively easy to spot with the current AI software used to generate them especially if you are dealing on a daily basis with presentation attacks aka deepfakes for facial recognition. FACEIO has already deployed a very powerful model to deter such attacks for the purpose of facial authentication: https://faceio.net/security-best-practice#faceSpoof
The store is immutable in the functional programming sense, as the package manager creates a new directory entry for each hash value.

Backups could be an option, but it is much better to have a system where two computers are guaranteed to be running the exact same software if configuration hashes are the same.

In other OSes, the state of your system could depend on previous actions.
Books Every Beginner Programmer Should Read
I pay them quarterly online with a credit card.
Emphatically NO. Involved in (IT) Risk and DORA in a firm that actually does IT risk scenario planning (the sort opposite of checkbox compliance). DORA is rubber stamping al the way round. One caveat is that we are way ahead of DORA, so treating DORA as a checkbox exercise might be situational. But I haven’t noticed a place where the rubber hits the road regulatory wise. It’s too easy to stay in checkbox compliance if the board doesn’t see IT-risk as a major concern. I’m happy one of our board members does. We’ve gone so far as to introduce a person and paper based credit line, so we can continue an outgoing cashflow if most of our processes fail (for an insurer).
please note that -entire hospitals- went down, all at the same time.

and reconsider.
This look pretty neat, wish there were some decent ebook readers for Android that can handle both pdf and ebpub....I was looking into moon reader but it requires an obnoxious breadth of permissions that seems very odd. Calibre is still my go-to on windows
You don't need exploits to remotely access and run commands on other systems, steal admin passwords, and destroy data. All the tools to do that are built into Windows. A large part of why security teams like EDR is that it gives them the data to detect abuse of built-in tools and automatically intervene.
Python ISO enums for the ISO-4217, ISO-3166, ISO-639 standards
Created a library to work with different ISO standards, like currencies/countries/phones. The library absolutely compatible with pydantic. Also it's really easy to use it with FastAPI, Starlette or similar.

I understand there is already a great library pycountry, but as you know dynamic enums in python is not the best choice. Also pycountries has it's own unique features like normalizing amount, etc.

Currently it has around 200 downloads a day, 1500 a week, 6000 a month and 1 issue created by a nice person.

Is it worth it?
Do you think this lib has feature?
Shall I promote it somehow or forget about this lib?
"I admit I don't have experience as an IT administator"

Then just hit the back button.
I think that the customers who regularly fly low cost airlines understand the game being played here.

In the US we have the same situation with Spirit and Frontier.

If you’re well-informed you can fly for an incredibly low price on low cost airlines.

These low cost airlines punish customers who cost the airline in their biggest costs like labor and fuel. And, yes, they upsell on unnecessary upgrades.

One person’s dark pattern is another person’s opportunity to save.

I once met a guy on a Spirit flight who was taking his first flight ever to visit family where he’d normally drive an incredibly long distance to get there, but because the flight was so affordable he could cut his travel time. I don’t think he cared that the website had dark patterns because he couldn’t fly on a traditional airline as it was cost-prohibitive.
The business world runs on Windows, no way around that unless you only need a simple cash register and inventory software.
Interesting thread, with half of the complaints different from my experience. But I also put my bag in the overhead without paying for anything but the most basic ticket, so who knows.

Funny dark pattern that I found:
When checking in on the app, they have copy&paste disabled. Hence, I need to enter booking code and email address manually. I next expect them to make the booking code longer (its only 6 characters), or reset when leaving the app, so that even more people fail at this task.
Inertia, plus integration - AFAIK Exchange and SharePoint don't run on Linux, so if the company buys into that, then it's Windows all the way down.

Still, all this is a red herring. Using Linux instead of Windows on workstations won't change anything, because it's not the OS that's the problem. A typical IT department is locked in a war on three fronts - defending against security threats, pushing back on unreasonable demands from the top, and fighting the company employees who want to do their jobs. Linux may or may not help against external attackers, but the fight against employees (which IT does both to fulfill mandates from the top and to minimize their own workload) requires tools for totalitarian control over computing devices.

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. So it shouldn't be surprising corporate IT favors Windows workstations too - it puts IT at an advantage over the users, and minimizes IT workload.
Online upgrades in general are difficult.

Imagine there are changes to the physical format for example, now you need to make sure all code works with both the new and the old format during the upgrade (as some pages will have been updated and others not). Supporting both versions requires temporary backwards compatibility code, bloating the codebase, and introduces a risk of error and increases the complexity of the system.

Since Postgres prioritises correctness probably more than any other database system I know, I’d guess they don’t want to expose themselves to the risk of error.
Well, the older version is about IBM, and it would probably even be true (today) if we were talking about mainframes, because they are one hell of a stable basket ;)
Wow, thank you for the context!! That was a fun read. And definitely explains some of the stuff I’ve read about Lisp. (I only ever thought to look into lisp because of this xkcd https://xkcd.com/224/)
WTF Is Wrong with Webflow?
I can never understand why people pay for Priority boarding! Would you rather stand on a runway/in a gangway tunnel/sit in a plane seat as opposed to sitting in an airport waiting lounge? It absolutely blows my mind.

Most people with priority boarding also queue, standing, at the desk the moment they get to the boarding gate. WHY?! You have a seat already?!
Random thought: GCHQ and IDF specifically seek out dyslexic employees to put on spotting "things out of place" be it a issue in a large amount of data, or something that seems wrong on a map, to a picture that contains something impossible in physics. Something about dyslexic processing provides an advantage here (not sure if I'd take this or reading at 1 word per hour), given GPTs are just NNs, I wonder if there is any "dyslexic specific" neurology you could build a NN around and apply it to problems neurodivergent minds are good at? Not sure what I'm really saying here as I only have armchair knowledge.
Not just indie coffee shops - chains too. Pubs, clothes shops... Even the Raspberry Pi store
Any reason this links to the comment section?
Pynchon always managed to integrate this tendency into the narrative much better. Stephenson is still worth it tho.
This has been my experience.

I used to run a C++ shop, writing heavy-duty image processing pipeline software.

It did a lot, and it needed to do it in realtime, so we were constantly busting our asses to profile and optimize the software.

Our IT department insisted that we install 'orrible, 'orrible Java-based sneakware onto all of our machines, including the ones we were profiling.

We ended up having "rogue" machines, that would have gotten us in trouble, if IT found out (and I learned that senior management will always side with IT, regardless of whether or not that makes sense. It resulted in the IT department acting like that little sneak that sticks his tongue out at you, while hiding behind Sister Mary Elephant's habit).

But, to give them credit, they did have a tough job, and the risks were very real. Many baddies would have been thrilled to get their claws on our software.
> I don’t have experience as an IT Admin

Wild that you’d write this comment with such a confident voice then.

I worked at a company who’s IT team managed both windows and Mac computers and apparently MS’s ActiveDirectory is leagues ahead of apple’s offering.
Which makes sense. MS is selling windows to administrators, not to users
Lots of people appreciate “technically good”.

Personally I can’t stand all but a few guitar solos. “Technically good”
When I took a Linux course in college I had an old laptop that I installed Linux on. However, for some reason my wireless card wouldn't work. I mentioned it to my professor and the next day he told me "It's actually quite simple, you just have to open up the source code for the wireless driver and make a one line change."

Maybe things have gotten better, but I think that's why people use Mac. It's POSIX but without having to jump through arcane hoops.
It’s not about whether they pay out, large enough customers demand you have insurance as a condition of sale. It’s cover your arse all the way down!
>How hard would it be to craft a malware that has the same signature as an important system file?

Extremely, if it were easy that means basically all cryptography commonly in use today is broken, the entire Public Key Infrastructure is borderline useless and there's no point in code signing anymore.
> “…we’re going to focus more on forecasting than, say, classification or anomaly detection—though a lot of the libraries below offer these features too.”

Doing some weekend warrior hacking in the accounting space. Reading this passage, I’m wondering if I could expect these packages to help with reconciliations--namely, multiple system reports for sales Vs. deposits and fees…??

Right? If you're going to forecast, then you could certainly apply the same to more-likely-than-not matching.
Excel is the driver for small businesses and individual departments. SharePoint is what keeps large businesses committed to Windows.
Cover grid, virtual libraries, customizable details pane (select the fields to show), filtering (both tree and search), virtual libraries (collection), export template, metadata editing and embedding (write to file).

Thats the few stuff I used regularly.
https://www.sherigai.com/
It's horrible to use though. Google's suite is somewhat better than MSFT's web one, but it still is weak compared to any established desktop office suite, even libreoffice.
It was established that the exact mechanics don't matter. But then you introduced an exact mechanic. This means that there must be something incredibly interesting or noteworthy about said mechanic to violate the notion that the exact mechanics don't matter.

But you have not yet shared what is notable about it. Breeding for a certain trait is farming 101. There is absolutely nothing interesting about that. So what have we missed?
Evan Gershkovich Sentenced to 16 Years in Russian Prison
That is right, there aren't many places to visit for tourists, but there are other things that Moldova is doing different and probably better than other countries: the food and the wine.

Since Moldova is in balkans, the food is something unique: there is "zeama", there is "soleanca" and the list can continue. These are foods that you don't find anywhere so quickly.

Also: Moldova has one of the biggest wine cellars from Europe(Milestii Mici). And also: the wine is something you MUST try.
> guarantees it will be loaded before any other third party drivers

Point of information. "Guarantee" and "any" are unsubstantiated by that MS article.
> Actually, it ends only when you're off the plane at the destination.

Assuming you land at the right destination: https://amp.theguardian.com/business/2006/mar/30/theairlinei...
The reason is because the EU deregulated in 1992. Ryanair didn't invent low cost (that South West airline from 1949 can claim that I believe) and they also had serious competition from EasyJet, a low cost competitor, amongst others. If the EU didn't deregulate they would not have got very far.

Yes Ryanair are victors these days but let's not rewrite history
It cannot and will not be fixed in an automated fashion.
The title is misleading, it was a Crowdstrike update affecting Windows devices
I've taken part in some security audits where I work. They're not a joke only because they're a tragic story of incompetence, hubris, and rubberstamping. They 100% focus on checking boxes and cargo-culting, while leaving enormous vulnerabilities wide open.
Time was, NeXT was a hard sell into corporations because it required so little administration, and what there was was so easily done IT staffs were hugely cut back after implementing them.

I'd be glad to see Apple bring those tools back.
So their malware definition turned into malware?

Good to know they don't check their definitions for defects before installing them.
I would disagree. I work in healthcare and we’ve always used SQL Server. While I wouldn’t pick it, it’s been reliable and integrates with auth.

No one “loves” Teams, but honestly it serves its purpose for us at no cost.

No one loves OneDrive but it works.

I think people underestimate how much work it would take to integrate services, train people, and meet compliance requirements when using a handful of the best in class products instead of MS Suite.
Crowdstrike did this to our production linux fleet back on April 19th, and I've been dying to rant about it.

The short version was: we're a civic tech lab, so we have a bunch of different production websites made at different times on different infrastructure. We run Crowdstrike provided by our enterprise. Crowdstrike pushed an update on a Friday evening that was incompatible with up-to-date Debian stable. So we patched Debian as usual, everything was fine for a week, and then all of our servers across multiple websites and cloud hosts simultaneously hard crashed and refused to boot.

When we connected one of the disks to a new machine and checked the logs, Crowdstrike looked like a culprit, so we manually deleted it, the machine booted, tried reinstalling it and the machine immediately crashes again. OK, let's file a support ticket and get an engineer on the line.

Crowdstrike took a day to respond, and then asked for a bunch more proof (beyond the above) that it was their fault. They acknowledged the bug a day later, and weeks later had a root cause analysis that they didn't cover our scenario (Debian stable running version n-1, I think, which is a supported configuration) in their test matrix. In our own post mortem there was no real ability to prevent the same thing from happening again -- "we push software to your machines any time we want, whether or not it's urgent, without testing it" seems to be core to the model, particularly if you're a small IT part of a large enterprise. What they're selling to the enterprise is exactly that they'll do that.