xemdetia

Based on the places where they were putting their threats I doubt mining was their goal. It sounds more that they were spelunking in case they wanted to ransomware and/or just wanting the information in a straightforward way. I wonder if also they were just using these servers as a foothold to attack something else. If you are mixing your traffic among an org's business presence it would be difficult to chase as a hop.

If you don't care about gestures as they've always been fine in my experience. I can't speak for gestures because the only one I use is right click (two finger tap). But for pointing the cursor and pulling the trigger the touchpad/trackpoint works fine I use both constantly since sometimes the trackpoint is easier to reach or the touchpad is easier to reach. I also use both sets of buttons as well as sometimes it's easier to have your left hand at home position and your right hand trackpaddin' but you use your thumb on space to left click.

I remember there being an interesting set of posts a long time ago where someone did this under their house as a passion project with only a small concrete mixer and they hand shoveled/hand troweled everything. If anyone remembers where I might have seen that I'd appreciate a link!

I find this funny because this feels like the opposite of my experience: my Linux laptop, Windows laptop, and Windows desktop usually have an uptime of a month+ with a sleep and resume schedule. Mac on the other hand is the one that is most unreliable and most flakey for me. I have to hard reset it regularly after it becomes completely unusable. At least when I am deciding to restart Windows/Linux it's because I want to pick up an update instead of it just being unusable.

I'm responding directly to what the whistleblower was alleging and they really didn't support an argument of their case. "I have damning information" doesn't mean anything without explaining more clearly what the damning information actually contains. Since they didn't I just can respond only to what the whistleblower wrote, and they didn't make a good case. They did not connect that their personal experience turned into an obvious out-of-channel enrichment of the buyer or the Microsoft person in cash or in kind. Asking your suppliers to reduce costs so that you can sell for the same price is normal, it happens in pretty much all industries. They are merely alleging that it was the path to nefarious acts.

If you go into the whistleblower's complaint and remove everything that is not his firsthand account there's shockingly little there around bribery. I do think that this individual has an HR legal case for being mistreated based on their writing but that has little to do with the alleged bribery. Reading an audit report that they didn't pen doesn't mean much and the findings could have been made right without their knowledge. Nobody goes back and marks findings on an original audit report 'fixed.' There is also a lot of jumping to conclusions. The only thing in the whistleblower post that I can see that they provided as concrete issue that they were firsthand involved with was a sum of $40,000 which is a great distance away from the $200 MM they are suggesting. If it was as prevalent they would have multiple transactions they were directly aware of and the sum would be much higher than $40,000. There is an assumption laden in the article that the only outcome for any discrepancy are bad actors enriching themselves instead of negligence or incompetence. Bringing in other cases where Microsoft was fined is irrelevant for the purpose of their whistleblowing, nobody cares about the other crimes we already know about we care about the crime you saw.

Too much of this sounds like a jilted employee on a PIP and not enough of it was just straight facts and clear cause for action. You don't need to craft a narrative, just whistleblow on what you saw.

I'm in this camp here. The article does a poor job framing the actual involvement Microsoft had and the whistleblower's writeup doesn't do a good job either. They did provide instances in the original whistleblowing that bad things did happen.. but they also showed that a lot of them actually got some sort of punishment/reaction instead of just pretending situation normal. A buyer, a reseller, and a seller working together to find a price that works by lowering the cost of goods is not a bribe since you know nobody is getting paid. They seemed to be heavily extrapolating that the buyer, reseller, and the Microsoft rep are splitting the proceeds of the cost mismatch regularly outside of normal revenues for the reseller and Microsoft. There needed to be a lot more sensible storytelling from the whistleblower pointing a finger and blowing the whistle at specific people who were doing the accused tactic.

There's a lot more extrapolation of facts into a narrative from the original whistleblower post. Trying to say that licenses that were bought that never were used was bribery is just confusing. Even I have licenses for things kicking around that I never installed but intended to someday. Whole projects can get planned, licenses purchased, and then for one reason or another scrapped but the licenses (or other material from vendors) are still 'bought.' For the bribery to mean anything (or like that other commenter who tried to whip out FCPA randomly) someone has to get enriched by the experience other than the reseller selling something and paying Microsoft its share. The whistleblower post didn't do that well.

There is just not a lot of good information that was provided by the whistleblower to actually connect all of this money that he estimates at $200 million to any sort of reality. Do I think he has enough beef for a employment law retaliation case (if he was in jurisdiction US law)? Probably. Did some people commit bribes and Microsoft was fined/Microsoft fired people? Probably. Do some resellers who are external to Microsoft end up violating the FCPA or 'normal US business ethics' in some regions? Definitely. But they aren't in the US, so the right venue for whistleblowing the activity is in whatever-country-in-question under their laws. Just based on the article and whistleblower post it sounds like there is just an assumption that micro problems in his local leadership were macro problems. I am not convinced.

This is something I see as a middle ground. I don't really think having the 'right' to a human fixes the problem. I just think the right to actually being able to get a conversation without becoming a member of the service to obvious bad behaviour from another actor or if the service decides to arbitrarily terminate service, and that to actually mean something. Right now it's clearly 'just sue' if you want things actually done. So many people are invested in social media or services in a way that a random misplaced ban can leave them stranded from actually getting help. On the other side the people in most orgs that deal with those category of issues are the janitors doing unwanted work, or that work is not prioritized. There's no fun catchall term like UX to even get people excited about fixing this class of problem.

Example of weird semi-positive was from reporting a particular serial scammer using a YouTube+Cloudflare combo where I would get always a submission receipt but then seemingly arbitrarily feedback that the situation was dealt with.

The issue I've been having is that for whatever reason the USB-C design seems to have a problem with twisting/tension near the ends in a way the USB-A and any of the USB-B varieties ever did. I've gone through more USB-C cables then I have replaced USB-A/USB-B cables from wear and tear then anything else. I'm not sure if it is the compact nature of the shroud to fit the spec but there seems to be no strain relief in the nature of the design and I'm usually breaking through the insulation in the matter of months and breaking the connector entirely to make it stop working a few months after that. Having to go buy replacement USB cables for things that were not my fault (misplacing or accidents) is just alien to me and premium OEM or the cheapest things seem to fail the same way at the same rate. With the increased actual power being sent through these new connectors and wires it just seems like I'm going to get an unfortunate jolt one of these days.

I would also say that the USB-C ports seem to get dirty in ways that end up affecting how the cable seats for a hours or years it always seemed to be reliable positive connection way more than I've had with other USB types. I haven't really looked at the mechanics of it but the number of times I feel like I've plugged in and gotten positive connection only to find out the connection was loose is way higher than I had with USB-A. With USB-A if you got it into the connector whether it was for an hours or years it always seemed to be reliable and not something to worry about.

I'm wondering since some of the cases were Patreon people with a large back catalogs that Vimeo is actually counting the bandwidth attributed to embedding their player or provide link previews as part of the total. A large list of embedded videos that never actually play might be costing Vimeo in bandwidth to just get them to where they could play. So a 'gallery' of posts might be burning them because Patreon isn't making effort to cache a preview image or something like that.

I agree that this is what I drew out of it. You can't hand wave away some pieces of the product as 'minimal' if they are directly applicable to the basic use case. I've been the audience that has to say 'great but the fact that this doesn't allow more than 20 things is a complete non-starter' constantly. You then wait for the next iteration and these critical changes aren't even talked about, and so you just give up on them and start working with the next vendor. Another variant I see often too is something that 'creates a job title' at the customer where their product is so much of a ongoing headache that you end up needing a FTE or department just to manage the thing. It is often quite apparent from the visible product where you ask about things like 'how does the system alert if there is a problem' or 'how do we know your agents are connecting' is a TODO item that says 'we defer to YOUR infrastructure' instead of having a plan that works through the whole system well.

I don't mind that people try to setup a minimal product or have people to be self-inserted to do the work that is planned to be automated later on the service company's side, but if your answer to the question 'if we use this product we'll have 1000 artifacts to configure, how do we do this efficiently' is 'you have to go one by one and we'll implement it later' on a product/service that clearly is going to have 1000's of things is just junky and not minimal at all.

EDIT: also don't be that person who says 'well you can do that with the API!' when you in fact can't do it through the API and/or it is the exact same level of clunkiness as the UI.

I'm not speaking 8GB as an end-user problem, but as a developer problem. Most of my developing machines are 32GB+ but I have to create successful workflows for macbooks that only have 16GB.

If anything this just reminds me how frustrating their product line was pre-M1 for so many years. I'm still dealing with the legacy of having to work with people with 16GB as the ceiling and projects that simply do not fit in them.

I would agree. In the US any class is defined by the social safety net they have and in the current workforce it's often entirely self funded with many parents/older generation reaching into the pockets of their children for labour or money. Even people living a 'middle class lifestyle' are one bump or bruise away from losing everything. Since the UK has a different expectation of a social safety net I can see how things might go in a different direction. If I was not constantly under the risk of healthcare costs blowing up what little I have built up then I probably would consider myself middle class. But since my income stops as soon as I stop and I don't have a huge runway to get going again I don't feel like I'm in the middle at all.

This is actually a hard problem even for most font libraries as it requires 'execution' of the font and kerning to actually know the parameters. I'm not saying this is a good answer but this is a tricky problem outside just Canvas2D. E.g. sour, soup, slip, and shin are four words with different heights, how do each in turn play out? Most of the time this is external to the font library and is in the layout engine which is talking to the font rendering context the same way you are in a raw font library/canvas.

To be honest this is one of the things that made web browsers and html so good is because it solves this problem really well compared to having to figure this out in native apps across languages the hard way.

I would say most modern code is not the kind of code written with the absurd platform assumptions that old code used to do. There's not magic addresses you have to know to talk to hardware, there's no implicit memory segmentation/memory looping, and so on. Ever since most modern OSs try to prevent direct access or randomize address spaces and so on it just is hard to write code that is insane like the way we were.

So the question is are you contesting the POSIX defined behaviour over using more logical interfaces from the OS or the wild west where people were hacking around broken, platform-specific features and often broken or awkward system libraries or just the more modern case where people use the standard interface instead of a more performant one. In the latter case I agree I wish there was a more 'nice' way of doing more dynamic and efficient feature detection without making simple C programs crazy complex.

Don't use an anonymous email. Just email them from an account you use and see what turns up, if it is such a frequent question the author in this day an age could post an errata to their website. They might even have a reworked bit of prose for a second edition or some-related-next-project. The only people I wouldn't email are the people that clearly don't want to be found from a simple search.

It's just an email, don't overthink it. Don't write a rebuttal essay, just express what you are reading and why it doesn't line up for you and send it along. Maybe there's something you're missing or maybe this is a bit of manuscript that was revised a few times and now doesn't line up perfectly. It's no different than going to a friend and asking if they can make heads or tails from it. They wrote a book to share something they found interesting people asking questions and clarifications is what I would think to be one of the few true rewards.

I think the other thing that makes it less relevant is that Safari is using WebKit and at this point its just a WebKit derivative. Part of the value that Firefox provides for better or worse is alternate components that force things to actually try and meet standards.

To me this is just the classic HN experience. If anything I hope there is some motivated founder that sees this problem and the post-pandemic lack of conference/user group talks with TED production values and starts innovating on the concept.

I think the other thing that pushed me to put it back on after experimenting with it off was the absolute dearth of inventory Youtube apparently thought was appropriate to show me. I watch a lot of content of various lengths in a lot of various fields but I would get the same one or two ads for days. Then I started getting the 10m+ ads that seem to be randomly OK for some reason? I don't think I could stomach another experiment.

I think that's the other thing that's understated too because a lot of these underlying choose-your-own-adventure pieces are also in wildly different levels of maturity when it comes to observing and debug. You can spend a while pursuing one solution only to find one of the pieces simply doesn't have the functionality or it is not achievable or the big thing for me is not able to be secured in any meaningful way or it's a TODO with no sign of completion.

That's still the main thing for me that gives me pause, it ends up being very unreliable when you are trying to secure it or simply put walls up around things. Finding out that your Network plugin doesn't support the thing you need is often not obvious until you have put in a massive amount of resources and work and sometimes it's not reconcilable. The idea of k8s is good, and the model is good, but the observability of features and working through the operational costs are still really raw right now and still has a lot of room for growth.

My favourite recent incarnation if this is when YouTube has its JavaScript go sideways and then it blames the internet being out instead of doing anything productive

I would say that telling someone who emailed you in an unsolicited fashion that you have an expected protocol for interaction isn't in the wrong and putting that line first in an unambiguous way is practically required for how people read emails. They did ask for context after that line, which was fine. I will say that the 'low-effort' part of their phrasing could have been constructed better but the first reply was more in the scope of stern and terse than outright insulting and hostile. I feel like I have to answer dozens of emails like this in a similar fashion because then I get the form letter or PDF that they want to show me over a meeting or they actually give an agenda and I can make the appropriate decision for myself. Since there's an existing relationship here any ambiguity wastes everyone's time, if it was an unrelated entity then you can assume sales email but in this case you can't. Any moderate sized company or larger is a multi-headed hydra so it's never obvious what part of the beast you are talking to and why they are seeking you out.

Another thing too is that if your main application artifact can be static while your sidecar can react to configuration changes/patches/vulns/updates. Depending on your architecture it can make some components last for years without a change even though the sidecar/surrounding configuration is doing all sorts of stuff. Back when more people ran Java environments there were all sorts of settings you can do with just the JVM without the bytecode moving for how JCE worked which was extraordinarily helpful.

It depends on your environment and architecture combined with how fast you can move especially with third party components. Having the microservice be 'dumb' can save everything.

I agree with these typography principles when they are applied to things that should be read from top to bottom and the entirety of the content actually consumed as a whole. There's just many circumstances that it is not appropriate and I would say an encyclopedia entry is not one of them. I want to be able to scan a lot of content without having to change pages to find where I want to start reading from. That and people are really abusing the modern typography principle to get me to scroll more and 'engage' rather than just convey the information in a nice way (most news sites and recipe sites are egregious) that I'm starting to get turned off by the style for the web even though it's based in good reasoning. For print it's still fine because you are also limited and also it's often a two-column layout which is still pretty efficient for scanning for key words or phrases while being easy to read. 'Above the fold' used to mean something but in current web so much content wants to apply these principles but also wants me to scroll ten miles get to the actual point of the content and it feels really disrespectful to me as the reader.

One of the best things I figured out that at least in the last 70 years or so ago it's pretty easy to find the "first" or foundational paper for a particular construct where they have to explain their notation for the first reader or they have the vibe of working with the new idea in the raw rather than 40 years later where it is matured. One example I use for this is hamming codes where some of the recent examples or explanations don't build it from first principles, but the original articles do explain it very clearly.

I feel like the conclusion you are drawing from pushing to is weak here. Yes, those with chemical dependencies for smoking or drinking that also are poor would fall in this category of taxes but sugary drinks, fast food, and prepared food I would say do not fall in that category. I'm not sure how you are tying the other ones because they are primarily consumption taxes as being pushed exclusively on the poor. Even when I was less fortunate what was killing me were things like gas tax, having tolls be more expensive then electronic payments/ezpass, paying government fees and incurring service charges unless you do some crazy manual effort, or running into services that needed me to have a smartphone with data instead of the flip phone I had at the time. Yes, I ate fast food and bought prepared food but I just did it less than I am doing now and I was choosing options that matched my income so my total tax burden from those verticals were lower anyway.

I would also suggest as someone on the other end is that they have been very aggressive trying to get people during the pandemic. The recruiter name changes every few months but you get multiple calls and so on, moreso than others I've been engaged with.

Depending on his circumstance why would he stop working with professors or as a PhD in the research community? It feels like others on this comment thread are making an assumption he enrolled as an ordinary student and 'skipped' to PhD, and now is about to jettison from academia entirely. The article sounds like he has been working in his scientific field for some time and is just as likely that the master's program was sponsored by his work at that site in his field. If you had someone who was working FT and stopping/starting through a master's program and at the end was more a junior research peer with clear expertise than just someone who 'finished a program' and the work had enough merit why wouldn't you upgrade it?

Yeah I feel like as UI has modernized the "search box" UI approach is still not as celebrated as it probably could. I quickly don't care if it's some quirky incantation of a pigeon language as long as it gets me precisely to the destination without messing around. In the few enterprise apps I've seen evolve that was the most successful change was to make either a UI search or a content search.

Yeah, this is the other thing that is bonehead about this. Forums at least got indexed but the discoverability of useful discord servers is impossible for information you cared about. A forum is still useful when indexed and you don't sign up and login, and you also can find the fringe discussion/subforum area you actually care about and sign up and join in then.