skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A colleague from work couldn't move house for a year because they would not accept meter reading. Another has his meter in somebody else's name and BG refuse to transfer it. Their support team in a bunch of ladies in Nigeria (kid you not, when you call them you get a message "please note that it may take a while to connect you to one of our support team" this is played after it's your turn to talk to someone). There are good reasons not to create a user account with them online or allow them free access to your bank account via Direct Debit. They are incompetent and disjointed as an organisation.
> That price seems crazy to me. It's "just a balloon" I don't see what their hard costs are that make this more than the cost of a commercial flight.

They need to make back the cost of R&D. IE, based on how much it costs to design and certify the balloon, the first flight might operate at a loss. They will need to perform X successful flights before they break even on the cost of R&D.

IE, it might cost $10,000 to pay the staff on the balloon ride, but the vessel itself might cost 10 million to design. It might use $200,000 worth of parts, but the factory cost $20 million to build. Those costs need to be amortized by paying passengers.

I'm sure the cost will come down, just like everything else. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale
Yes. That’s the race condition
Or even more boring to prevent people from clicking “There are sulfur crystals on Mars”
Hi, as I noted to another commenter, I'm a journalist looking to speak with people who've been impacted by the outage. I'm wondering if I could speak with your wife. My email is sarah.needleman@wsj.com. Thanks.
The issue is where it is integrated. You could arguably implement CrowdStrike in BPF on Linux. On NT they literally hook NT syscalls in the kernel from a driver they inject into kernel space which is much bad juju. As for macOS, you have no access to the kernel.

There is no shared responsibility. CrowdStrike pushed a broken driver out, then triggered the breakage, overriding customer requirement and configuration for staging. It is a faulty product with no viable security controls or testing.
Didn’t realize that US is the scope of the OP article.
> (on Linux you had to do things yourself at the time AFAIK, I don't think the situation has improved much)

You can schedule the updates any time you want, want to do it staggered then configure that, want to do it all at the same time then do that, want it with a random interval also possible. I don't see the "you need to do everything yourself" option as much as any managed environment.
How are you supposed to have competition for something like this? Ultimately the prison will only go with one carrier.
Those "CNBC analysts" truly know nothing, especially when it comes to tech. They're just cheerleaders who repeat talking points all days.
crazy how much he was right. if he hadn't gone down the path of violence out of self-loathing and anger he might have lived to see a huge audience and following.
RVV can imitate NEON, but will it perform anywhere near reasonably on hardware? With NEON, you can be sure that the hardware will be optimized around 128-bit operations and thus comfortably use it for such. Whereas RISC-V hardware with 512-bit vectors might only get quarter throughput if you only need the low 128 bits (and that could end up slower than doing scalar code! whereas on ARM you can be pretty damn sure than 1×128-bit NEON won't be slower than 2×64-bit scalar or some SWAR).

Much as I like RVV, fixed-width use-cases still exist and are pretty important for CPU SIMD; scalable vectors work well for very-many-iteration embarrassingly parallel loops, but those are also things most suited for being moved to a GPU. Where CPUs have the most potential is in things with some dependency chain or small loops, for which scalable vectors largely just add questionability of performance.
I know I've lost tenders due to not using a pre-approved anti-virus vendors which really does suck and has impinged the growth of my company, but since I'm responsible for the security it helps me sleep at night. This morning I woke up to a bunch of emails and texts asking me if my systems have been impacted by this and it was nice to be able to confidently write back that we're completely unaffected.

I day-dream about being able to use immutable unikernels running on hypervisors so that even if something was to get past a gateway there would be no way to modify the system to work in a way that was not intended.

Air-gapping with a super locked down gateway was already getting more popular precisely due to the forced updates threat surface area, and after today I expect it to be even more popular. At the very least I’ll be able to point to this instance when explaining the rational behind the architecture which could help in getting exemptions from the antivirus box ticking exercise.
For those not in the know, Xe posts a version of this story everytime something like this happens (large scale memory safety failure), just like The Onion re-posts their similar article after every mass shooting in the US.
and all microsoft have to do to increase cloud revenue is make defender chew up 5% more CPU every few months

directly incentivised to make shit software
Rust is amazing tho... it has no memory problems and it is 100% memory safe.. very secure.
Not according to Air France. https://www.connexionfrance.com/news/air-france-flights-and-...
I’m trying to google finger and all I get is fingerprint software
Unreasonably idealistic solutions are some of the worst kind of solutions because they make you feel like you have the answer but the benefits never materialize. The moment you pick any other OS to be the "80% of the world" one, reality will quickly deflate any sense of superiority.

And whether you can see it or not, they're all still some form of dumpster fire, be it security, usability, price.
From your comment that I originally responded to:

>examples tend to illustrate how relatively rare it is

Given the fraud and replicability issues that have been shown to exist even within the most reputable institutions and journals, I think this claim needs some substance to back it up.

>this has mostly become a troll at this point

Please review the HN guidelines. They specifically reference assuming good faith and avoiding shallow dismissals. I’ve tried giving that to you by asking questions and giving you multiple opportunities to give evidence to your position.
And why are they running windows? And why are they running Crowdstrike? WTF
Because almost everything industrial runs windows because that's what the devs of those companies were most familiar with since MS-DOS days and evolved organically over time to modern versions of Windows due to great backwards compatibility and platform familiarity.
It's actually not limited to racial slurs:

> Yellow-flowered shrubs called Hibbertia, after anti-abolitionist George Hibbert, are one plant group that some botanists would like to rename.

It's so easy to be against slavery when living in a society where everyone is against slavery (Edit: people aren't black and white, I think it's great that we remember the names of "imperfect" people; it shows humility, open-mindedness, tolerance of viewpoints we may not agree with, etc.). Regarding slurs:

> One of the proposals aims to rename an estimated 218 species whose scientific names are based on the word caffra and various derivatives — which are ethnic slurs often used against Black people in southern Africa — and to replace it with derivatives of ‘afr’ to instead recognize Africa

So, it's a very "local" slur: "caffra" sounds adorable to me. Reminiscent of the "coq"[0] story (which means "roaster" in French).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coq_(software)
In that case, automatic updates likely need different permission levels. What exactly is allowed to be updated automatically?
"It is impossible to write bug-free/exploit-free code."

Right, and this should be the single deciding factor for most system programming and core infrastructure development. One doesn't throw away 20+-year-old battle-tested code simply because it's grown ugly bug fixes for edge conditions no one wants to worry about. The idea that it's possible to throw away, say 30-year-old font rendering code and replace it without revisiting a lot of the problems along the way is peak hubris.

And the same goes for choosing and building internal IT systems, KISS should rule those choices because each layer adds additional code, additional updating, etc. Monolithic general-purpose software is not only a waste of resources (having software that 9/10th is just taking up disk/memory/cache space because only 10% of its features are used), but it's a maintenance and security nightmare.

This is the problem with much of the open-source world, too. Having 20 different Linux filesystem drivers or whatever is just adding code that will contain bugs, exploits, and a monthly kernel update containing 80 KLOC of changes is just asking for problems. Faster processes, updates, and development velocity in projects that were "solved" decades ago are just a playground for bad actors.

So, to go back to Andrew Tanenbaum and many others, no one in their right mind should be writing or using OSs and software that aren't built from first principles with clearly defined modularity and security boundaries. A disk driver update should be 100% separate and compatible with not just the latest OS kernel but ones from 10+ years ago. A database update shouldn't require the latest version of python "just because".

Most software is garbage quality written by a bunch of people who are all convinced they are better than their peers. And yet another code review, or CI loop, isn't going to solve this, although it might stop a maintainer from throwing poorly tested code over the fence instead of subjecting it to the same levels of scrutiny they give 3rd party contributors.
CLI tools to build, browse, and blend your media library
Malware can do tons of damage even with only regular user access, e.g. ransomware. That’s a different problem from preventing legitimate software from causing damage accidentally.

To completely neuter malware you need sandboxing, but this tends to annoy users because it prevents too much legitimate software. You can set up Mac OS to only run sandboxed software, but nobody does because it’s a terrible experience. Better to buy an iPad.
I'm guessing hundreds of billions if you could somehow add it all up.

I can't believe they pushed updates to 100% of Windows machines and somehow didn't notice a reboot loop. Epic gross negligence. Are their employees really this incompetent? It's unbelievable.

I wonder where MSFT and Crowdstrike are most vulnerable to lawsuits?
No Crowdstrike salespeople in France?
Dedications are what you make of them. If you like it, it's a good dedication.
Security and Compliance gets to violate all good sense, because it's just sooo important. They can run un-reviewed un-sandboxed daemons as root on every system if they really want, they can have changes pushed automatically without review or control, because "security" is just so important, and due to "compliance" you really have no choice as your company gets larger, you just have to do it. That's why, despite being obviously pretty dumb to many skilled engineers, it seems like everyone does it. No choice. Security, Compliance. So dumb ...
It’s hard to imagine “full CSS support” being a selling point for an email client. Even for a free email client, funded by advertising, compatibility with other email clients is necessary for the advertisers.
I work IT at a regional 911 center. We're fine but I sympathize with those who are back to pen and paper dispatching. Hard for most current dispatchers to realize the way we did it back in the day.
Why Trump asked Ukraine's president about 'CrowdStrike' (2019)
"CrowdStrike determined in June 2016 that Russian agents had broken into the committee’s network and stolen emails that were subsequently published by WikiLeaks. Its findings were confirmed by FBI investigators, with whom it later shared the forensic evidence."
Were transcripts sent to you so you could document evidence of a crime, or evidence that there was no crime?
I'm a general purpose computer, the distinction between software and data can be pretty fuzzy.
Nice demo! It so easy to see that Vector RAG just can't answer complex queries that are more that Sematic Search results.

We also build a similar demo based on the UFC dataset - https://github.com/FalkorDB/ufc
As a person with a music degree, albeit not in composition, but I had several friends who were composition majors, my impression is that composers often do write music in old baroque or classical styles etc., which are academically well understood, but they do it more as an exercise. Probably some composers even do compose exclusively in those styles. But the point is we don't know it because there isn't much interest from general audiences in anachronistic music and of course there isn't much commercial interest either.

Bach of course produced a lot of music that came down to us, but he was paid to do it as a court and church composer. He had to have something new ready to play every day in the styles that were popular at the time. That was his job. And he improvised much of it and then wrote it down and developed it later, which was very common at the time (and even now).
Business Continuity Plan chaos gorilla as a service.
This whole thing likely would have been averted had microkernel architectures caught on during the early days (with all drivers in user mode). Performance would have likely been a non-issue, not only due to the state of the art L4 designs that came later, but mostly because had it been adopted everything in the industry would have evolved with it (async I/O more prevalent, batched syscalls, etc.).

I will admit we've done pretty well with kernel drivers (and better than I would have ever expected tbh), but given our new security focused environment it seems like now is the time to start pivoting again. The trade offs are worth it IMO.
10W? I think that means 4 AA batteries would keep it running for about an hour.
Clearly not, since that's unenforceable and a bad idea anyway. Instead we pretty much have to play whac-a-mole by smacking regulation onto things when the industry can't or doesn't self-regulate itself. Just allowing competition isn't a fix. It might be better than not allowing competition, but that's not even guaranteed anyways, nothing is a panacea.
"Don't worry, you only have to take drugs with major side-effects* that are also financially crippling for the rest of your life. You'll be fine."

Say that to somebody who was just "given" HIV by a malicious/incompenetent doctors and see how they react.

Aside from the side effects, any number of things can limit access to the meds - moving, job loss, insurance company fucking up paperwork.

* everything from anxiety, depression, liver damage, kidney damage, the list goes on and on.
things are so interdependent that in this scenario you might now just end up crashing the system if either Windows or Ubuntu are down instead of just the one of them you chose
Would love to hear your feedback once you do try GraphRAG.
What's funny to me is that in college we had our computer lab set up such that every computer could be quickly reverted to a good working state just by rebooting. Every boot was from a static known good image, and any changes made while the computer was on were just stored as an overlay on a separate disk. People installed all manner of software that crashed the machines, but they always came back up. To make any lasting changes to the machine you had to have a physical key. So with the right kind of paranoia you can build systems that are resilient to any harmful changes.
Now it's not worth $83.
Code is data and data is code
Oh man, you work with some cool (and dangerous) stuff.

Outage aside, do you feel safe using it while knowing that it accepts updates based on the whims of far away people that you don't know?
Paranoid? Phishing is very successful.
wait, what? how does that work? why are you charged at all for being sent to a place you have no choice in not going to?
What makes you think windows is "a security dumpster fire"? The fact that most infections are on windows machine doesn't really count because most machines are also windows machines.
Cool that you open sourced this. As you say there's nothing open quite like this.

Not using MJML as a design decision. Foes that simplify deployment a lot, or just keep things lighter? In turn, do you have to strangle a lot of compatibility issues yourself? etc. Thanks.
Choosing which immoral deeds to make illegal is a very central role of government!
This distinction is meaningless at best and harmful at worst.

If a code path isn't followed until a config file updates, that is practically the same thing as the code path being introduced by the update.
Ask HN: Am I using Mastodon wrong?
I made an account on mastodon.social. Posted about a variety of topics, observing to use hashtags that people actually follow, but... almost no engagement whatsoever?

Maybe I'm using it wrong? I know there are many thematic instances that mastodon.social is federated with, but would I need to get an account on each of those to ever get any interactions? With no federated auth (afaik) no way I'm gonna get even more accounts to which I'm gonna forget the passwords.

Edit: probably turning on these two is going to help: https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/814/483/545/218/588/original/c53e77a530927f2f.jpg
But a loss of availability is so much more palatable than the others, plus the others often result in manually restricting availability anyway when discovered.
Seems to be a perfectly rational decision to maximise short term returns for the owners of the company.

Now make of that what you will.
there was a production incident at a customer that was this exact scenario
There’s also the issue of company valuations being based on the “value of your IP”. Being able to pull out a large number of patents to show your investors can raise the stock price, whether or not the patents are any good.
Maybe it was checked but the CI didn’t cover this edge case.

I think the team writing the parsers for these data files deserves some blame. This should have been fuzzed, property tested, etc.
The individual person that pressed the "go" button (if there was a person), is going to henceforth be __the best__ DevOps person to ever have on your team. They have learned a multi-trillion-dollar lesson that no amount of training could have prepared them for.

And the Crowdstrike CTO has either been given the ammunition to get __whatever they ask for, ever again__ with regard to appropriate allocation of resources for devops *or* they'll be fired (whether or not it's their fault).

And let me be very clear. This is absolutely, positively and wholly not the person that pressed the button's fault. Not even a little. At a company as integral as CrowdStrike, the number of mistakes and errors that had to have happened long before it got to "Joe the Intern Press Button" is huge and absurd. But many of us have been in (a much, much, *MUCH* smaller version of) Joe's shoes, and we know the gut sinking feeling that hits when something bad happens. A good company and team won't blame Joe and will do everything they can to protect Joe from the hilariously bad systemic issues that allowed this to happen.
I've never found real-time dictation software that doesn't need to be reviewed.

I'm definitely waiting for Apple to upgrade their dictation software to the next generation -- I have my own annoyances with it -- but I haven't found anything else that works way better, in real time, on a phone, that runs in the background (like as part of the keyboard).

You talk about Whisper but that doesn't even work in real time, much less when you have to run it through an LLM.
I wonder why and how does security software read a PNG file. Sure it's not tough to parse a PNG file, but what does it look for exactly?
You're reading too much into that quote. This is in a section titled "early experiments". It was an initial goal.

There is a lot of historical connection to Prolog, due to the original implementation, and there are syntactic similarities and non-linear pattern matching and dynamic types and a general declarative vibe, but the actual end result of Erlang's evolution, despite the goal of "something like Prolog", is not very much like Prolog at all. Erlang is a functional language, not a logic language. Prolog is a logic language, not a functional language. General goals like in that quote can change over the decade-long development of a language.
low permission systems

allow nothing and then gradually allow some activities that are deemed safe

do not allow software to be installed from arbitrary locations

app sandboxing and third-party vendors cannot break their sandbox

basically, iOS, Android, ChromeOS

50% of the people impacted today probably only need a browser
Thanks for sharing your creativity with us, Julian.
Exactly this.

This is a faulty and dangerous product from conception to execution.
OpenAI's latest model will block the 'ignore all previous instructions' loophole
Honest question: would you expect Congress to respond in a way that's a true net-positive?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_(protocol)

An old, old Internet protocol that was used to get information on a user, and could be used by users to post updates from their .plan files. Essentially plaintext social media for people with Internet connections in the 80s and (early-ish) 90s.
Some major drivers of innovation for that time period:

A lot of people were very recently very upskilled on the government's dime. A shitload of Navy personnel had just been trained on things like electrical engineering to better understand the radios and radars they were operating, and others were taught how computers worked and accidentally turned into early software developers.

Labor was in short supply so companies had to provide significant benefits and eventually pay to make their business work. Low level labor making more money directly enriches a majority of Americans at the time, and a rich base like that has more resources to devote to buying goods but also investigating WHICH goods are worth it, ie making market competition actually work instead of just being about who has the lowest sticker price, which is a direct result of modern americans being dirt fucking poor in money, time, attention, resources, etc. A shortage of labor and therefore increase in the wealth of the everyman may have also contributed to the renaissance.

The US was still PUMPING money into basic sciences and basic technology research. This is especially useful for materials science which feeds a lot of engineering.

So many people had been recently put into such high positions that there wasn't as much of a "Management class", workers were managing workers. People could focus on doing things instead of office politics, ass covering, and pretending to look busy to people who have no freaking clue what they are managing.

Germany lost IP protections for many things. This results in a fertile ground for innovation, because everyone can freely make a widget that matches the now invalid german patent X, so there is high compatibility in widgets, while also being high incentive to improve your version of Widget X in some way so you can patent that improvement, meaning there's a lot of exploration going on in the solution space. Patents explicitly freeze investment into large solution spaces, especially with how vague modern patents are, how incompetent and undertrained/understaffed the patent office is, and how hard it is to get a court to invalidate bullshit patents.

Basically all those things businesses insist are bad made the world better for consumers, and more importantly, people. State investment into the population paid huge dividends. Who could have guessed.
For those that come straight to the comments:

This reddit post was written hours before the outage