skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I spent tons of time with Google Search Appliance (at least 100 hours reverse-engineering it) it was just a CentOS machine with a daemon called Babysitter (which was just a loop restarting services), and a C++ binary called gws (Google Web Server).

Fun fact, if you ran gws without its config files you would see the real front end for Google Search, News, etc.

Web configuration interface was in Java, writing some XML templates if I remember well.

So taking all of that, besides a very boring OS there was "nothing" or very little amount of open-source they were using.

It was more all homemade (except the OS).

Fun fact: There was a secret hardcoded password in clear (but only for physical access).

EDIT: Password was different for each instance, not the same as I thought.
Ha, very good.
>slipped past umatrix & ublock origin on my first try. Given that I launched chromium by dragging the link onto its icon the first time, perhaps the script-blocking extensions weren't fully loaded?

Yes. Chrome will actually pause extensions loading to deliver you that first rendered picture fraction(arguable, probably slower in the end considering extensions load from disk) of a second faster. I think it was direct uBO sabotage.

TLDR: First website loaded by starting browser with a link or from last session has almost 100% chance of bypassing uBlockOrigin. Chrome and Chromium based browsers are not User Agents, they are Google Agents.
It's better than that. If you use FORTIFY_SOURCE then you will get _runtime_ bounds checking.

So, while you still have to make sure your structure is sane, now the runtime can play along too.
Scan HTML even faster with SIMD instructions (C++ and C#)
iPhone SE 4 to Take Design Cues from iPhone 16 Same Back CoverWith Single Camera
> On the one hand, the costs of becoming politically informed—learning about politicians, issues, policies, and relevant social science—are very high for individual voters. It takes a lot of time and energy, which could be spent on other important—or simply more fun—activities. On the other hand, the negligible impact of individual votes means that being informed has little benefit. Given this, political ignorance is rational.

I have been toying with the idea of a system that allows voluntarily delegating my vote to someone who I think is rational, more informed than me, and cares about things important to me, more than me. I would love to know the flaws in such a system.
>> It is in this sense that Prolog to Erlang comparisons should be understood.

What I'm saying is that this is the entirely wrong thing to focus on, i.e. syntactic similarities. Prolog is a language of the logic programming paradigm, one of the first ones. Its syntax is that of (a restriction of) the first order predicate calculus. Its programs are First Order Logic theorems. Its interpreter is an automated theorem prover. The motivation for Prolog is the ability to program a computer using the syntax and semantics of First Order Logic, to be able to prove the truth values of statements in a formal language automatically, with a computer. It has nothing to do with Erlang, a functional programming language designed to program telephony switches. Any similarity is superficial: Erlang expressions are not definite clauses; everything in a Prolog program is a definite clause, modulo punctuation. Knowing Erlang will not help you learn Prolog just because the syntax looks similar. You can forget about that right now- that's the misconception I'm trying to correct. Don't encourage people to try to understand Prolog that way because you will only cause them pain.

Take the site you link to as an example. It tries to bodge together Prolog with Erlang and Elixir in a "side-by-side reference sheet" that includes rows for "assignment" and "parallel assignment" using =/2. That's the unification predicate! Prolog does not have assignment! Just imagine the suffering of a novice programmer trying to use their knowledge of assignment, in Erlang or any language, to understand the following:

?- X = a, X = b.
false.

That's just setting up programming students to fail, to fail to understand, to fail to learn- and to only succeed in blaming Prolog for being a stupid, painful language that is hard to learn. Of course it's hard to learn! If you go around telling people that they can learn it more easily if they know Erlang!

>> Your arguments of grouping/comparing widely dissimilar languages are somewhat disingenuous.

No, the point is that they are widely dissimilar and that you won't understand that if you just stop at the syntax. Like the site you link to, where someone clearly made an effort to memorise syntax but completely failed to understand semantics.

Semantics shmantics! The attitude I see here is the one that Peter Norvig criticises in "Teach yourself programming in 10 years": try to find a shortcut around the hard stuff so you don't have to use the brain. You don't learn anything that way.
i don’t care about this at all
Building AI Agents for Autonomous Clouds: Challenges and Design Principles
The rapid growth in the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI Agents as part of software development and deployment is revolutionizing the information technology landscape. While code generation receives significant attention, a higher-impact application lies in using AI agents for operational resilience of cloud services, which currently require significant human effort and domain knowledge. There is a growing interest in AI for IT Operations (AIOps) which aims to automate complex operational tasks, like fault localization and root cause analysis, thereby reducing human intervention and customer impact. However, achieving the vision of autonomous and self-healing clouds though AIOps is hampered by the lack of standardized frameworks for building, evaluating, and improving AIOps agents. This vision paper lays the groundwork for such a framework by first framing the requirements and then discussing design decisions that satisfy them. We also propose AIOpsLab, a prototype implementation leveraging agent-cloud-interface that orchestrates an application, injects real-time faults using chaos engineering, and interfaces with an agent to localize and resolve the faults. We report promising results and lay the groundwork to build a modular and robust framework for building, evaluating, and improving agents for autonomous clouds.
Richard, we're making the box.
>Is this the future of developers to just blindly trust a statistical text generator?

Unfortunately, yes.
> That said, it's pretty obvious that economic sanctions aren't bringing about regime change.

On the flip side, you have China, where US pretty much helped build up their economy and hoped for a peaceful and democratic outcome. How well did that go?
These jobs are low-paying because they're broadly unproductive. If some of them weren't doing these jobs, the wages paid for them at the margin would increase. We are vastly better off importing more skilled immigrants to high-income countries, compared to unskilled ones.
You're comparing top-down structures with each other.

We all live in top-down structures. Even Switzerland is a representational democracy (or a bunch of representational democracies in a trenchcoat) at its core. States are extremely allergic against relinquishing power so they usually only allow for federations in constrained, often bureaucratic forms: clubs, corporations, interest groups, etc, all of which often end up being top-down structures themselves, either through mimicry (gotta have your by-laws) or legal compliance (someone has to foot the bill).

The assumption seems to be that "scale" must be vertical. The various idle rich humming John Lennon's tune are completely oblivious to its message. We know that human brains are evolved to deal with "small" groups of people (think families or housing blocks) and that this breaks down once you get into the dozens let alone hundreds. We also know that close-knit groups of humans are very stable and often engage in acts of altruism, even within groups beyond this scale (think neighborhoods, villages) as long as they follow a web of trust they can intuitively comprehend.

Humans are really good at scaling horizontally. We even invented diplomacy and currency to settle disputes with groups outside our web of trust without having to engage in violence and war. This is the brotherhood of man. The only problem with this kind of scaling is that it doesn't allow for the concentration of power and wealth in individuals because it is ultimately a network of peers rather than a hierarchy of domination.

I think Democratic Confederalism is an interesting approach to a horizontal model that satisfies our modern need for a certain level of formality and structure while still building on our evolutionary strengths.

Remember: our evolutionary advantage isn't our individual intellect, it's other people. Our intellect may allow us to defeat any natural predator but we come into this world naked, defenseless and entirely dependent on the kindness of others. Helping other humans is literally in our DNA, not just when it comes to child-rearing.
3.5 trillion?

If I'm going to assume that most babies, some children, and a few third world people do not smoke at all, and round it down to 3.5 billion smokers alive in the world today, you're saying that every single smoker throws 3 cigarettes into the ocean (just the ocean, not counting landfills) every single day?
We accept it when rich marketers spy on and manipulate the public. I think if we’re going to ignore that, then there’s no reason to care when they’re targeted. If all of the sudden we start caring about the spying, then fine let’s direct concern towards spying on marketers too, but right now it’s hypocritical.
lowering cost of labor expands our economy, agglomeration effects, etc.
I guarantee you Apple will take zero responsibility for a failing or issue with third party software, notwithstanding the purported difference between notarized and signed.
I wonder if you have any experience or opinions about dealing with the Rust Foundation itself. My personal observation from small talks with them is that Rust decentralized communities are the driving force.
I am just happy with self-hosted Wordpress. Lots of interesting plugins, once you get the hang of it, you can write your own plugins (as I did). Can take moderate load (say, 30 visitors a minute) just fine.

1000 a minute would be bad, but that's not a typical load for a blog, unless something you wrote goes completely viral. Happened precisely once to me in 8 years of writing.
Having a speed limit on the German Autobahn would save 140 lives a year. It's hard to understand why they still don't have a limit. Countries like Denmark and the UK have much less traffic deaths on their highways.

https://etsc.eu/autobahn-speed-limit-would-save-140-lives/
For someone without skills or who has a lot of student loan debt but no job, I can understand thew rationale of rolling the dice on low-scale fraud: if you succeed, you make a lot of money and are possibly set for life. If you fail, you go to a comfy dorm jail for 5 or so years, and then when you get out the prison will help arrange employment opportunities (these will not pay well , but it's better than nothing), and alluding to our era of moral ambiguity, sell the story as a Netflix special and go on the podcast circuit. Sure your record will be shot, but it's not like it matters if your prospects were bleak to begin with.
For the record, the equation you noted makes sense only in a first-past-the-post system such as what we have in the US. It does not behave as such in a more advanced voting system, e.g. a ranked-choice system. Also, in a coalition party system, the 54% win.
Good to know, I suspected that this might be the case, but never got to confirm this. I guess one could set up a test comparing the syscalls listed in syscall_64.tbl (or syscall table read from kernel memory) with the syscalls listed under /sys/kernel/debug/tracing/events/syscalls
So they benefit from the extra “regimentation”, although whether they like it or not is another matter.
Consisting of 4 (or 8) null bytes, the symbol for which is ␀ (letters NUL). I don't think we need this level of pedantry.
I can envision better uses for robot spiders if we want to disincentivize littering.

Hell, I'm willing to contribute to the open source repo
For large enough subterranean structures, air exchange becomes a challenge.

One place this is evident is with naturally-formed caves, where changes in atmospheric air pressure translate to air movements in and out of the caverns themselves, one consequence of which is the many "moaning caverns" --- the airflow and resonances are sufficient to create audible sounds associated with the movement. It can take hours for pressure to equalise if the volumes and apatures are sufficiently divergent.

Warm air will rise, and cold sink, yes, but if there are any trap-type structures (e.g., a tunnel which rises then descends again) the rising/falling air will be trapped at a local maximum or minimum. This is directly comparable to a thermal inversion associated with smog and urban pollution, often occurring during winter time. The only way around this is forced or active ventilation.

You've also got the "stale air" problem. If there's only a single entrance, or entrances are only on one part of the cave complex, air as a whole moves in and out of the caverns, but the deepest and furthest recesses see relatively little interchange. This leads to one of the hazards of spelunking in the event noxious gasses accumulate or oxygen is displaced.

For the London Underground (and other subway systems), much of the air exchange is provided by the trains themselves, through the "piston effect" of a trainset moving through a low-clearance tunnel. You'll experience this as the gust of wind which preceeds a train's arrival, or the suction as it leaves a platform. This effects some thermal transfer, but mechanical ventilation is still required.

Non-transport-oriented underground or partially-subgrade structures typically have far more relative air transfer, and would generally have less-signficant airflow / air exchange challenges, though I suspect there's still quite a bit of HVAC engineering involved, for thermal and other reasons (stale room-space air, radon emissions, mould & moisture, etc.).
They could bring in Xzibit for the commercial: “Yo dawg, we heard you liked Crowdstrike so we got you some Crowdstrike for your Crowdstrike!”
Not when it comes to video/image/vector editing. DaVinci Resolve, Adobe and Affinity are still miles ahead of FOSS creativity tools like The GIMP.
Why would we be opposed to unskilled immigrants? The majority of the people who came here from Europe in the 1700s and 1800s were laborers, factory workers, farmers, and other simple occupations. Why are we pulling up the ladder behind them? Did you want to freeze the US as it was circa 1950? Things change man. The US isn't forever, anymore than Rome was. You gotta stop trying to fight the current and pretending that by preventing "unskilled immigration" you can maintain the US in some hypothetical idealized state completely specific to your imagination.
You're correct on the banning front, but Alaska is one of only three states that use RCV in any state-wide elections and Utah is one of only four states that offer it state-wide as an offical option for local elections. The blue-coded states use it in some local jurisdictions but don't encode it at all at the state level.

There's definitely a Democratic slant to the 7 states that have some sort of statewide policy approving RCV's use. But then again, Utah has more municipalities listed on that article as actually using it at the local level than all 5 Democratic states (Colorado, New Mexico, Virginia, Maine, Hawaii) combined.

In other words, the issue isn't as cut-and-dry in your sources as you make it sound.
No one sells 8 bit microcontrollers from the 1980s anymore. Just because you don't need the full power of modern computing hardware and software doesn't mean you are going to pay extra for custom, less capable options.
VO2Max Testing on the Phone
if you don’t think lots of immigrants (and likely illegal immigrants) work as farm hands and at meat processor plants, you have clearly not spent much time in those industries

https://www.latimes.com/food/story/2020-05-26/meatpacking-in...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/28/business/economy/immigrat...
Apache Wicket Web Framework
Instead of calling out AV/EDR solutions as malware and spyware, I have a better solution: Stop using your workstations for private stuff. They belong to the company, and they are a liability since you use them to access the company environment and could cause damage if actual malware would find its way onto it. Use a separate device for private stuff if you want privacy.
CrowdStrike Flagging Policy on HN
Anything critical related to the CEO of Crowdstrike gets flagged immediately.

Flagged posts are not searchable anymore, but browsing the past "new hn" posts, here are some results, mine included:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41017925

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41017866

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41017863

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41017491

None of these deserve a flag according to HN guidelines, no clickbait, flameware stuff. What's going on?

@dang?

My post wasn't even critical, still it was flagged within 15 minutes. It was just a list of facts from independent.co.uk.
Yeah that's fair, I don't have a strong enough background in statistics to be able to catch edge cases in these kinds of things.
What about the non-cloud version of InDesign (CS2, maybe CS3?) that Adobe made free for download around 2013-2014? This timing was related to the Adobe Creative Cloud being released in 2013, eleven years ago this week.
While I believe others at Adobe later backtracked and decided that the noncloud suite was no longer free _and never had been_, that has been discussed on HN elsewhere.
Hello fellow Gen-Xer. I remember a teacher in high school (male, coach, hairy thick forearms) telling us at an end of senior year assembly, with a huge smile: "Enjoy these times, everyone. These will be the happiest days of your life!"

And I immediately thought he was a fucking pathetic loser who needs to stop raining his shitty life over the rest of us. At 17 I wasn't so stupid to believe that could possibly be true. But you hear that crap non-stop from adults at that age.

For a couple of people in my high school that might have actually been true, though. Seems to correlate with getting drunk and high (sorry, "partying") non-stop.

Also, the teacher got arrested a few years later for shoplifting.
I’ve been using Quarto for a few years now. It’s quite a breeze to use. Highly recommend to anyone looking to publish technical writing on their static site.
What is and isn't legal immigration is always a moving target. A majority of US history included open borders where it was legal for anyone to get off a boat, provide some basic info, and go on to try and make their way here.

The idea of closed borders, immigration caps, etc is relatively modern and driven more by the fact that social entitlement programs cost money than a fear of dangerous people coming here.
The idea that Google is a capable arbiter of quality is laughable to anyone who knows what SEO stands for
Grey import through Chinese websites like AliExpress? I doubt those individual sales are registered on the total sales numbers of the USA.
An easy way to reduce illegal immigration is to raise quotas. People would rather migrate legally.
A big cultural outcome of Netware was the shear volume of highly compatible Novell network cards that flooded the market. Novell charged a fortune for Netware licenses but their hardware was cheap. Especially when corporations upgraded and there was suddenly 1000 NE2000 cards for $2 each at the local swap meet.

Imho the entire LAN culture of the 90's was enabled by being able to join in for the cost of a coffee and people would often have a few spare cards for those that showed up to the party without one.
I'm 41 and the happiest I've been. Kids are growing, I've got a well paying job, bit of time for hobbies, and I've started getting more involved in the local community via a sport I enjoy. I could have done some of the the things that make me happy earlier in life but it's hard when you're putting effort into your career.

I didn't enjoy high school times, University was ok but I was too introverted back then.
If I'm feeling conservative, I would open a self-storage facility.

If I'm feeling energetic and risky, I would evaluate the commercial viability of radioisotope batteries.
>Really interesting to me that none of the commentators I've seen in the press have even hinted that maybe an OS that requires frequent security patches shouldn't be used for infrastructure in the first place.

Nobody's commenting on that because it's the wrong thing to focus on.

1) This fuckup was on CrowdStrike's Falcon tool (basically a rootkit) bricking Windows due to a bad kernel driver they pushed out without proper hygiene, not on Windows's security patches being bad.

2) Linux also needs to get patches all the time to be secure (remember XZ?) It's not just magically secure by default because of the chubby penguin but is only as secure as it's most vulnerable component, and XZ proved it has a lot of components. I'd be scared if a long period goes by and I see no security patches being pushed to my OS. Modern software is complex and vulnerabilities are everywhere. No OS is ever bug-free and fully bullet proof in order to believe it can be secure without regular patches. Other than TempleOS of course.

The lesson is whichever OS you use, don't surrender your security to a single third party vendor who you now have to trust with the keys of your kingdom as that now becomes your single point of failure. Or if you do be sure you can sue them for the damages.
> Sometimes it's fine to sit back and let people make their own decisions and even mistakes...

“I’d far rather be happy than right any day.”
Should be, or with a clearly defined interface against the open web
Oh wow. They really did fuck up Wayland.
Stability was heavily dependent on your display card and driver >= 4.0 until the recent past. It could be fine or horrible depending on how well the manufacturer did their job.

My memory is that 3.X could restart graphics if a crash happened there.
Part of Microsoft's problem is that right before the CrowdStrike outage, there was an outage of some large Microsoft services, making the two look connected. It didn't help that a lot of Microsoft support consultants also ran CrowdStrike laptops, getting affected right when customers were.

But this is quite typical. Microsoft generally doesn't direct blame to anyone (anyone non-malicious at least) but in this case I feel like they really should.
I hope they start with the ones which are obviously fraudulent (most likely illegal) and have already been reported to them as such. For example "secure end-to-end-encrypted private chat apps" which actually send messages unencrypted to a web server.

Source: Gave up on trying to be a vigilant netizen and reporting to the black hole.
And they’ll likely have a “this need to be supported for 50 years” provision too
Send an email to the address in the guidelines page. dang has already said that they don't monitor for @-mentions.
Interesting article. I have always been curious about how weapons systems like missiles communicate with command and control systems. Especially how the datalinks worked on cold war era systems. Not a lot of info out there. So this article was a good read.