Hacker News Reader

squirrelon Preliminary Post Incident Review

There’s only one sentence that matters:

"Provide customers with greater control over the delivery of Rapid Response Content updates by allowing granular selection of when and where these updates are deployed."

This is where they admit that:

1. They deployed changes to their software directly to customer production machines; 2. They didn’t allow their clients any opportunity to test those changes before they took effect; and 3. This was cosmically stupid and they’re going to stop doing that.

Software that does 1. and 2. has absolutely no place in critical infrastructure like hospitals and emergency services. I predict we’ll see other vendors removing similar bonehead “features” very very quietly over the next few months.

squirrelon CrowdStrike code update bricking PCs around the world

BBC live coverage: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cnk4jdwp49et

squirrelon Identifying Leap Years (2020)

Fun maths, especially computing the inverse of 25 in Z/65536Z!

As the article mentions, you need a slightly different calculation in the period between 45 BC and 1582 AD -- the rule about 400 didn't exist in the Julian calendar in force then. Before 45 BC, and in non-Roman-based calendars, it gets even more complicated with intercalary months and postponing New Year's and such.

But surely in all but the tiniest fraction of cases, you only care about years after 1582, and years that are no more than a few centuries in the future. There are only 223 leap years from 1582-2500 (I checked with ChatGPT so that number must be right!) A binary search of an ordered 223-item list would require at most 8 comparisons, and if you don't mind a little more space, you could just store all 919 of those years in a list and look up the answer directly. Wouldn't either be faster than any of these methods (and clearer)?

squirrelon Text-to-Music Editing for Music Language Models via Instruction Tuning

The actual product is at https://heymusic.ai/ . This appears to be a link to a blog post within the site behind a weird UI.

In my brief testing, the product produces non-terrible examples of generic trance with suitably absurd lyrics. Not so good at Mozart's 41st symphony.

Minor niggle: the "create your own AI music" prompt overlays other UI elements so I have to resize to use them.

squirrelon Claude's Character

Genuine People Personalities certainly worked out well for the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, why not try them on Earth too?

squirrelon Multi AI agent systems using OpenAI's assistants API

Zenfetch

squirrelon Rachel Aviv Wrote That New Yorker Story on Lucy Letby

Lucy Letby is a nurse recently convicted in the UK of murder of a number of babies in the ward she worked on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Letby .

Rachel Aviv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Aviv wrote a piece in the New Yorker about the case that raises doubts about the accuracy of the verdict: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Letby#Doubts_about_convic... .

This article is not available in the UK due to a court order: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/may/15/mp-u...

The case, and the suppression of the article, is about a current event and touches on issues of censorship and the uses of statistics that are often discussed here on HN.

squirrelon I don't want to fill out your contact form

My email address has been on my public website for at least 15 years, and my spam level is constant and manageable. That may simply indicate that I’m not popular enough to encounter the problem, of course.

squirrelon Phishing Campaigns Targeting USPS See as Much Web Traffic as the USPS Itself

Reminds me of the fake police station in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep [1]. In order to keep up the pretense for three years, the androids have to take crime reports, do paperwork, and arrest perpetrators. In other words, they have to run an actual real police station. So perhaps the fake USPS sites should just start delivering the post!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Androids_Dream_of_Electric_...

squirrelon Personal computing paves the way for personal library science

Try Zenfetch. It's designed for this use case.

squirrelon Unit Tests Considered Harmful

The obligatory definitive guide, of which the author appears to be unaware: http://www.growing-object-oriented-software.com/

squirrelon Google suspends romance author's account for writing sexually explicit content

Google Takeout will give you an archive of your email (and everything else).

squirrelon Launch HN: Zenfetch (YC W23) – Turn notes/browser history into an AI assistant

For my primary usage, suggesting topics and ideas based on what I've written and read, hallucinations are harmless -- if zenfetch suggests a silly or baseless idea, I just ignore it look at the other nine. So yes, but it doesn't really matter for me.

squirrelon Launch HN: Zenfetch (YC W23) – Turn notes/browser history into an AI assistant

Gabe/Akash will tell you their plans I'm sure, but I'm already using it to import PDFs and other documents via the web, so I don't feel the need for anything on the desktop. (A local version would be stupendous for client confidentiality, but I'm not holding my breath for that.)

squirrelon Launch HN: Zenfetch (YC W23) – Turn notes/browser history into an AI assistant

I’m using zenfetch intensely for research using my own work (hundreds of podcast episodes and blog/forum posts) and others’ (books, articles, and more). Results so far are largely excellent, with the occasional bug fixed quickly. RAG as a service is tremendously beneficial and zenfetch means you don’t have to roll your own.

squirrelon Ask HN: What are the best articles on managing people?

https://www.jrothman.com/books/behind-closed-doors-secrets-o...

squirrelon I'm an engineer that needs to sell my services. Any good books on sales?

Million-Dollar Consulting is as good or better

squirrelon I'm an engineer that needs to sell my services. Any good books on sales?

You probably weren't talking to an economic buyer.

squirrelon Ask HN: How to be a manager? Any good sources for learning how to delegate?

Johanna Rothman: https://pragprog.com/titles/rdbcd/behind-closed-doors/

squirrelon How to compete with Patreon

Micropayments, fraud, alternative transaction models — this would be a perfect topic for @patio11 . Would love to see a bits about money newsletter on this.

squirrelon The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”

On nebulosity, see https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262134095/ . No need to read it, just to be aware that there’s a thick book full of people trying to get a handle on what a concept like “park” or “vehicle” or “in” actually is for humans, and failing completely.

squirrelon Don't Use Mocks

A very good way to use mocks (not like illustrated here) is explained in the GOOS book by Freeman and Pryce: http://www.growing-object-oriented-software.com/

squirrelon We Don't Know How to Compute (2011) [video]

Isn't Sussman's idea similar to the tuple spaces of languages like Linda? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuple_space

squirrelon FIDE world chess championship decided in rapid tiebreaks

GM Daniel King explains games in an accessible and very insightful way on the PowerPlay Chess youtube channel.

squirrelon Is forced treatment for the mentally ill ever humane?

Read books on schizophrenia by Dr Xavier Amador for an interesting perspective on gaining compliance without necessarily agreeing on what the problem is. Excellent videos on YouTube also.

squirrelon Why can’t we get a handle on this safety thing? (1998)

See normal accidents by Perrow, and meltdown by Clearfield, for much more on the anatomy of accidents of all kinds.

squirrelon People tricking ChatGPT “like watching an Asimov novel come to life”

If I recall correctly, in his paper on whether machines could think, Turing gives an imaginary dialogue with a computer trying to pass as a human (what we later came to call the Turing test) where the judge poses an arithmetic problem, and the computer replies after a pause of 30 seconds — with the wrong answer.

squirrelon Multi-Kernel Drifting

A debugging tour de force all the way down the stack, from Unix command to reinstall to truss and dtrace to C code to assembly to analysing data structures! Leaky abstractions indeed.

squirrelon Revised Report on the Propagator Model (2011)

Sounds similar to tuple space models like Linda (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuple_space ) and the blackboard model in AI (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_system ).

squirrelon So you want to be a consultant? (2005)

From 2005 (see bottom of http://unixwiz.net/techtips/ )

Also, Alan Weiss and Jonathan Stark cover similar material in more depth, for those interested.