skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Because of him.

Ballmer backed the "Enterprise Business" (precursor of Office 365) and "Server and Tools" (precursor of Azure and MS Security) divisions over the then prominent "Windows" division.

MS back then was in a weird transitional phase where it as a company needed to decide whether it wanted to prioritize B2C or B2B/Enterprise. Ballmer made the call to go for Enterprise.

There was also no guarantee that then-resurgent Apple or new-kid-on-the-block Google wouldn't be able to eat into MS's Enterprise market share with release of the iPad+iWork and Google Apps (now Google Workspaces) respectively.

Before Ballmer, it was the Windows and B2C teams that had the upper hand internally at MS instead of Enterprise.
If they sue, this comment will be used to make their case.

I guess I just don’t understand - how are you proceeding as if this is an acceptable starting point?

With all respect, I don’t think you’re taking this seriously, and it reflects poorly on the team building the tool. It looks like this is also a way to raise awareness for Omni AI? If so, I’ve gotta be honest - this makes me want to steer clear.

Bottom line, it’s a bad idea/decision. And when bad ideas are this prominent, it makes me question the rest of the decisions underlying the product and whether I want to be trusting those decision makers in the many other ways trust is required to choose a vendor.

Not trying to throw shade; just sharing how this hits me as someone who has built products and has been the person making decisions about which products to bring in. Start taking this seriously for your own sake.
I really enjoy the luxury brand episodes. Hermes, LV, etc. are huge companies that have been around for a long, long time.
The main product of AMEX is not a credit card.

It is a charge card which sets them apart from the credit card business and brings a higher yield to AMEX, the business.
It's this thing that gets me
I think BOTH must be held liable. I’d share the blame 50/50. And if Microsoft should have checked the CS sw because msft signed it (I’m not clear on if that happened), then I’d generously make msft also 10-15% responsible.
The irony of this appearing on the Nature site… when their own editors routinely reject even remarkable results that go on to become highly cited seminal papers in “lesser” journals.
Type 2 has had a high correlation with obesity and high carb diets.
If you are interested in a conceptual guide to SAML, rather than a walk through which shows XML, this is still the best one I know of: https://duo.com/blog/the-beer-drinkers-guide-to-saml

Saw some simplifications in the post like where the signature goes (it can go in the assertion but also can go in the response) but appreciate this is a gentle intro, as the author states:

> I’ve omitted a lot of details here, some of which matter greatly for security reasons.

One thing about SAML is that, like HTML, the world is the best test case, and you can run into compatibility issues over and over (hyrums law and all that). My employer, FusionAuth, also supports SAML and has for years (first commit to our open source SAML bindings was in 2019) and there are still edge cases we run into.
Somebody else mentioned power tools. I'd love for governments to start to address the lack of battery standards with power tools.
Just living my life in an urban setting it’s never been a problem.

Had a serious episode about a month ago (ketones at 9 mmol/L). I was on a short backpacking trip with some friends: four 15 mile days. I don’t carry a lot of carbs. My pen became hot despite my best efforts.

Had another episode earlier in the year in a similar trip backpacking in the snow — shorter distance, harder work; my meter froze and stopped working so I don’t know BG level. On the second day my pen got “slushy” even though I carried it next to my body/in sleeping bag.

My understanding is that in these cases your liver starts out dumping glycogen into the bloodstream but reserves are exhausted and so you start going into ketosis. I don’t understand the mechanism under which my glucose then hikes — some stress reaction?

This is generally scary for my companions but not for me as I am a bit confused, falling over etc. The only feasible way out was to hike. Fortunately on the first trip we had adequate water access so I drank (and pissed out) about a litre a mile.
Japan doesnt have an over tourism problem, they have tanking economy problem. Weak currency means they can at least make some money on tourism.

With exchange rate similar to ~1986 Im surprised Japanese manufacturing sector isnt doing better, they should be killing it now with exports.
Actual soldering was determined to be unsuitable way back with Ni-Cd rechargeable/disposables because solder just isn't quite a good enough conductor of electricity for the duty.

Plus when current is flowing, where more resistance is encountered will be the places where more heat needs to be dissipated, and solder melts too easily. Which is why they factory-welded them at instantaneous temperatures beyond the melting point of the interconnection itself.
Creator of Zig asked "how to open a file in C++" in SO 15 years ago
No, the backbone is Microsoft Office Communicator, which was rebranded to Lync, then Skype for Business, and finally embedded in Teams. The Skype consumer product, which they acquired, has very little to do with any of this.
I'm guessing the "wow" meant something like "Huh, 'meritocracy' -- that's rich, coming from the guy born with an emerald spoon in his mouth." HTH!
AI Could Have Positive and Negative Effects on Cybersecurity
Before I quit, it was ~6 drinks per day minimum.

Here's the essay I wrote when I decided to quit:

[1] https://taylor.town/1000-weekends

Here was my 8-week progress report:

[2] https://taylor.town/8-weekends

Right now I'm 96 weeks in! Going great!

If you need any support/encouragement, always feel free to email me at hello@taylor.town :)
Degrees of Torvalds: Mapping the Open-Source Connections Through GitHub
Hi HN,

I'm excited to share my project, Degrees of Torvalds. Inspired by the "The oracle of Kevin Bacon" concept, this tool maps the open-source community by tracing connections to Linus Torvalds through GitHub commit histories.

What is Degrees of Torvalds?

Degrees of Torvalds lets you visualize how any GitHub user is connected to Linus Torvalds. By analyzing commit graphs, it reveals the collaborative network within the open-source ecosystem. This first iteration features a straightforward user interface that shows a given user's connection history to Torvalds.

Why Did I Create This?

The project celebrates the interconnected nature of open-source development, illustrating the collaborative spirit that drives it. Whether you're a seasoned developer or new to open-source, Degrees of Torvalds aims to inspire by showing how close you might be to one of the community's most influential figures.

Technical Details:

Backend: Built with FastAPI for efficient request handling.
Frontend: Developed using React for a smooth user experience.
Deployment: Hosted on Google Cloud Platform for scalability and reliability.
Try It Out!
Explore Degrees of Torvalds at sixdegreesofgithub.com. Your feedback and suggestions are welcome!

Happy coding!

- Oluwatobi Adefami
There’s a lot to say about the problems of JWTs, but they absolutely are extremely widely used for access tokens, and by many big players (Microsoft, Okta, etc). The JWT RFC is a product of the OAuth working group.
He was entrepreneurial, in summary his strength. He convinced shareholders to part with potential dividends and invested in new things. There's little excuse for company like Microsoft generating so much cash not to be doing so.

Mixed bag:
Xbox 360 - success
Vista - fail
Windows 7 - success
Zune - fail
Windows phone - fail
Azure - success

Similar story for Zuckerberg.
Lucky with Facebook.
Thereafter ensured he had a finger in every pie.
One minute he's a bad bet with his quixotic expenditure on AR/VR, and
the next minute he's a genius with his investment in AI (Llama).

At the end of the day, it pays to have your finger in many pies. Money makes money.
Also have a fierce loyalty to AmEx as a customer. I use it as often as I can to pay for things. Their customer services is phenomenal, and its nice to have an arbiter between you and a merchant when things come up. Anytime I've had an issue with a merchant, I try to work with them first, and then jump to Amex if they aren't willing to work with me. In every instance Amex has been able to fix the problem, typically by refusing payment to the vendor after an investigation. It's like having insurance for your purchases.

I say this as a generic green card member of 25 years. I know a lot of people pay for higher tiers for travel benefits, but the base service has been excellent for my needs.
The problem is that Olympians are kind of just by definition outliers. Is this competitor a cheater because he can sustain 20 watts higher than others for most of the race? Or is he just a physical outlier who made it to the Olympics because of his unusual power output?
Cutthroat capitalism existed long before Jack, that top reddit comment is quite the thing. Carnegie was a wanker, Ford was a wanker, Sloan, the list could go on and on.

I teach business all day every day and I only reach for Jack to teach "Fix, Sell, or Close" - In terms of clinical business he was right, in order to focus fully on the customer, the business units need to be empowered and pushed to be 1 or 2 in their given segment. They should have all the resource and time they need to focus fully on the customer problems. Out of the 70s GE had become quite unwieldy, he did a great job of re-focusing the resources where they could be best used.

I also think talking to how they engineered their finances without looking at the whole picture is a bit unfair. GE was in a bad place when he took over, it was way over extended doing a meh job generally. He surly needed cash to 1. refocus the business 2. expand research and innovation into the areas left (jets and healthcare primarily) 3. implement a large scale global expansion.

Should you do channel stuffing or bill and hold? No. Even worse: when you blur it into your reporting, that is just asking for SEC enforcement. Is there a better way to do it? Yes. Were they being sloppy? Yes. If it really was part of saving GE, should they have done it? Well, I'll leave that to you dear reader. :)
The Hottest Job Market in a Generation Is Over
Don't make your application engineers write IaC code
Hillel Wayne wrote an excellent series of articles on whether software was "engineering" that included interviewing traditional engineers that were now in software [0]. I strongly recommend it.

For me, I sit next to EEs and MechEs all day working on safety critical systems. There are some differences in our jobs, but frankly I don't see the substantive differences that would make one or two of those non-engineering compared to the others.

[0] https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/
Sure, but if they market it to power users, I'll take that as a win. Right now they're not targeting such a thing to any users. Until then, I'll stay on Linux, and buy Mac or Linux exclusive devices.
I agree. Firing is at least more honest (or there's a lawsuit if it isn't). Being pushed out sucks. I know because it's happening to me right now for bullshit reasons (the complaint is that my throughput is inconsistent but yet my average throughput is better than the other dev of my level on the team, and I'm involved in more above and beyond work). Being pushed out is very stressful and has negative mental and physical effects, especially if you have specific disabilities (I do).
Which leads you to situations like last Friday.
Dazed and Confused: A Large-Scale Real-World User Study of ReCAPTCHAv (2023)
Longhorn was a failure born of ambition.

W10-11's failures' are born of greed.
This is not the case, as like I said you can shrink either of those filesystems and its container and use the freed space for this.

(Also I think lvm doesn't need the volume blocks to be contiguous on the physical volume. So you might have N free space after volume a and M after volume b, and lvm would let you create a new N+M sized volume.)
Physicists may now have a way to make element 120
This is like comparing DevOps engineers and Systems Administrators.

Both extremely important to the business but sysadmins are perceived at a lower level?
Ask HN: Why is most software lacking important functionalities?
And why it often doesn't get addressed even though clearly many people need that? What can I try to do myself to bring change?

A few examples:

1. No full text search in (Firefox) bookmarks without turning to extensions or external apps¹.

2. No way to export a chat log in Signal without turning to external tools¹.

3. No way for both mobile and desktop email clients to have customized replies (do it the Markdown way instead of the "On date x user y said ...").

3.1 No cross platform way to have threaded emails. On desktop there are many possibilities while on mobile (Android) k-9 email comes the closest, though it's listed rather than threaded, the way it is on Thunderbird or Gmail website.

¹It adds a dependency to maintain and extra effort to the workflow. It also breaks interoperability between platforms. We're talking about basic functionalities that should be built-in so in my opinion it makes even less sense to outsource it.
How quickly a mistake can be corrected is irrelevant. If the software causes a plane to crash it doesn't matter that the fix is quick and easy.

Similarly if the software causes a worldwide outage of critical infrastructure.

In many cases it is imperative that the software be correct from day 0. Just like a bridge.
I started with hyprland when I switched my desktop from windows to arch recently (june) and moved to sway. I ran into bugs and behaviour I don't like:

- Having two monitors and turning them off (either physically or through dpms) shifts all workspaces to the last monitor that is on, even if it's on for a split second,

- Turning off monitors (physically/dpms) caused waybar to crash.

I don't have those issues on sway, so I'll stick with it until hyprland matures a little more.
Ask HN: If you can't find a job(in tech), why not create one
This is the title of a YouTube video I watched yesterday, and I agree a lot because the barrier to entry is so hard nowadays. what do you think ?
Liminal Thinking
I wish we had a definition for machine learning engineer
Thanks for your article. Decent ideas in it.
There is quite a lot of work left in terms of detailed track planning. People that were working on that were all taken of the project. But this can be restarted, these projects are on-ice, not dead.

Its certainty more ready then any potential large scale project in the North only.

> We all know there's not much money left.

Not sure what that means.

> And politically speaking, Labour needs to give the north of england a fair deal on infrastructure spending

HS2 is the best thing that can happen to the North, far better then any other possible prject. I'm not sure why you are not seeing this.

Express trains to London are ruining all the local network on the traditional main lines, and thus all connected branch lines.

HS2 will put all the express trains onto HS2. Meaning all of a sudden all the other lines have massive amounts of utilization free that can finally be used for regular regional and local travel.
Wu-Tang Forever? The Afterlife of a $4M Album
I think this is one of those "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" questions.
Hyprland is such a masterpiece of technology, cool to see young programmers take on such projects that keep moving oss forward.
You can also compile a scrap to C (and then probably from there to native, or apparently with pnut you can now compile to shell...)
the pythagorean theorem is not named after its discoverer, unfortunately, as historians of mathematics have dated its earliest known usage to well before pythagoras
It's relatively cheap to run at the moment, so I haven't had to invest too much! We're serious about making it work, though, which includes getting it to be profitable.
I think it takes probably some effort, not all C programs will compile on this thing.
The MLDEV was quite convenient for talking to the other ITS machines, as they just lived in the filesystem no differently from local files.

Among the many hackerish features of ITS was allowing a user space process to act like a device, not just for a filesystem but as a TTY, which allowed a lot more kinds of terminals to be supported than would fit in the monitor (kernel in today’s parlance).

All in the early 70s.
i agree with all of this except for the 'perfectly competent' part. a programmer who advocates hiring someone else because they're too busy doing routine work instead of automating it is not a 'perfectly competent developer'; they're what this article terms a 'technician'

(actual technicians, however, for example in electronics or chemistry labs, are generally not doing routine and predictable work; they spend a lot of their time debugging why things have failed, which is the opposite extreme, and they tend to automate as much of their work as they can. so i'm not convinced the choice of term is correct)

neither toolmakers nor surgeons in brooks's model were doing routine, predictable work. (but his model also hasn't been very successful, so possibly it wasn't a good model)

i like smaug's term 'toil'. so maybe we should say 'software engineers should not toil too much' instead of talking about what they should or shouldn't be
Navigating Layoffs in 2024: A Survival Guide
Not that I personally use it, but Azure seems pretty relevant and Microsoft's financials seem pretty decent. I'll give you that Microsoft on the client-side does seem like a legacy installed base--albeit a big one. But client-side growth is pretty much a niche these days outside of mobile and, yes, Microsoft lost that.

However, generally, I could name a number of companies that descended into legacy irrelevance (not a few of which were acquired by Broadcom) but I wouldn't put Microsoft into that category at this point.
From what I have read, it was nowhere near as comprehensive and integrated. I only read about them once, so I don't really know.
Although not released yet, the render engine[1] is being extended to support new texture-packs and especially ray-tracing. Which seems to be the reason they targeted the more modern APIs.

1. https://github.com/rt64/rt64
It's just a silly affectation.
> The traditional old venues […] will resurface again.

… to be subsequently drowned out by AI “copies” of themselves, which in turn are used to train more AIs, until we don't have a Dead Internet¹ but a Habsburg Internet.

--

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
I think you can do the same with https://developers.cloudflare.com/images/transform-images/
For some reason, I am thinking about the green-blue and grue-bleen paradox.

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

The "New Riddle of Induction," proposed by Nelson Goodman in 1955, challenges our understanding of inductive reasoning and the formation of scientific hypotheses. Goodman introduced the concept through his famous "grue" example.
Imagine a property "grue," defined as "green up to time t, and blue thereafter." All emeralds examined before time t are both green and grue. The riddle asks: Why is it rational to predict that future emeralds will be green rather than grue?
This paradox highlights the problem of choosing between competing hypotheses that equally fit past observations. It questions our basis for preferring "natural" predicates (like green) over "artificial" ones (like grue) in inductive reasoning.
Goodman's riddle challenges the idea that induction is based solely on observed regularities. It suggests that our choice of predicates in forming hypotheses is influenced by factors beyond mere observation, such as simplicity, familiarity, or projectibility.
The New Riddle of Induction has significant implications for philosophy of science, epistemology, and artificial intelligence. It raises questions about the foundations of scientific prediction, the nature of natural kinds, and the role of language in shaping our understanding of the world.

Related :

https://x.com/eshear/status/1812926436623413285

There are crystal structures that simply won't form anymore, even though they did a few decades ago. Real life Ice-9? Could make an incredible sci-fi book.
And that's bad, how? Is it a sport (where the optimal amount of luck is non-zero) or a scientific study? Also just make them run multiple mazes then. I tend to think of sport fundamentally as simulated warfare, the further you go from the mess of reality in pursuit of fairness and justice, the less worthy the endeavor becomes.
CrowdStrike: Preliminary Post Incident Review
This is a tangent, but I enjoyed reading the few amateur author given-away-for-free ebooks that I’ve bumped into online, but I don’t know where to go to find more. What are the go-to sites where amateur authors publish?
> Is the internet as we knew it drawing to a close?

Were the interactions on the internet as you knew it on completely centralized commercial platforms?
Interesting, last time I looked at it, it was early alpha or something, a few years ago.

I wonder how the mobile support is.
"A loss of X dollars is always the responsibility of an executive whose financial responsibility exceeds X dollars."
- Weinberg’s 'First Principle of Financial Management' and 'Second Rule of Failure Prevention’

- 'First-Order Measurement', Quality Software Management, Volume 2, Gerald Weinberg, Dorset House Publishing, 1993

It seems to me that there's a need for the Crowdstrike CEO to take responsibility, e.g. for lax testing and for not doing canary rollouts.

And it seems to me that there's a place for the [airline|bank|hospital] CEOs and CIOs to consider implementing canary 'roll-ins' where new software is tried on a small scale before being installed everywhere.
As a reader I wouldn't mind another source of articles. It surely wouldn't replace HN but more variety is always welcome.

I'm curious as to how you will handle content moderation; will everything be vote-based or will there be free/paid moderators?
Naah, hard to say what exact proximate cause (excuse) they entertained in their fucking skulls, but yes, it comes down to budget.

Police budgets are a farce, and this is what the US gets. Public services are (in too many cases literally) criminally underfunded.

And .. obviously the last ~50-60 years of "tough on crime" dogwhistling (as the civil rights movement successfully moved the discrimination boundary) is the new heuristic for quasi-segregation. Of course it's was not invented overnight back then, as it has been ongoing since ~1866. The post-Reconstruction culture and policy changes all boil down to "X while Black" and occasionally "or poor".
It is not, as that entry did not gather any discussion or upvotes.
If it's public facing, I would think content moderation and copyright enforcement would be the bigger challenge.
Bfox made the name field in gnu finger specifically long enough to fit my entire name.
True but the solution for that is to punish those companies in the domestic market of the people who signed up.

There was US company that tried to launch on an Indian vehicle not following all the regulation and they got fucked hard.

Of course countries like Russia are simply not gone follow these rules anyway.
I seem to recall a similar argument being made a while ago: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/waldo/files/waldo-94.pdf
This take makes sense in the context of the specific example, but falls apart for most other software engineering. You can't automate away defining business logic, but in many cases you can deliver it predictably.