vintagedave

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50335324 - my submission, I linked here since this is the better thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50335615 Has more info. Looks a wider attack

I oversee and contribute to compilers / toolchains, and I have sometimes had worries about what 'my' compiler could contribute to. I am of course not responsible, but it's not a nice feeling to know a path towards some unpleasant end had steps that involved you.

It reminds me of that version of Linux that was used for automated gun targeting and firing, perhaps in the early 2000s. Authors gave away their code as open source, and then that open source was used for what many felt was an evil purpose. A path to something many disliked or opposed now included them and their actions, despite their good intentions.

That would have been due to V for Vendetta, which was heavily inspired by the story of Guy Fawkes.

> Deeply political in its origins, [Bonfire Night] was born of a specific moment of national crisis in the 17th century. Does it still resonate today, when the narratives of our national history are ever more contested?

It's a mildly horrific celebration, with its tradition of burning an effigy (Guy Fawkes.) The man himself was not executed by fire, but in the end by hanging, I think. Wikipedia has some unpleasant details of what was planned for him.

Yet today, effigies of other people are placed on the fire. I feel it is a relevant festival, in that unlike Halloween (spooky ghosts, commercial) it's a deeply political festival, the result of failed revolution. It's a celebration of the establishment winning, and yet somehow people see it more as a celebration of the attempt.

> repurposes the high-speed commercial processor inside the Ingenuity Helicopter Base Station ... This radiation can induce “transient bit flips” in memory the software needs to function, and the team developed an effective software-based approach to radiation hardening

Anyone know what they're doing?

It sounds like a single processor, so no best-of-three or similar systems. Software solution only, possibly running on the same bitflipping CPU that's being checked. I'd be very interested to know how it's solved.

I love that two small mice were found in a jar. Sad for the mice, but it's such a normal slice of life.

At home I sometimes find a dead spider fallen and trapped in a drinking glass. Since moving to the countryside, mice in winter have become a reality. Recently for kitchen repairs, I found several dead ones that had fallen into the cavity around our range hood, which was built apparently once, not made to be opened. Here I am, two thousand years later, experiencing in my kitchen something similar to those Romans in their wardrobe.

What does the following mean - are they saying that, respecting this law, the property found should be used for the benefit of Pompeii today? (From callahad's link [0].)

> Both the report and the Park’s press release invoke Tacitus and the rules for property left without heirs. The report adds that this reference needs philological and legal-historical study before it is tied to the owners of this house. The measure I could trace is in Suetonius, Life of Titus 8.4, which assigns the property of those who died at Vesuvius without heirs to restoring the buried towns.

'Restoring the buried towns' - what a wonderful idea, that Pompeii's treasures were, and by tradition and respect today are, used for the benefit of the site!

The press release, Google-Translate-d, has only speculation about what happened to the residents:

> But perhaps they didn't make it, and they could be among those who, as the historian Tacitus recalls, died without an heir, and whose assets were supposedly used for the refoundation of Pompeii, which ultimately never materialized.

...which is considerably less romantic than the thought that the artifacts and property would have have the ancient law respected today.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50304156

This is how an AI-assisted article should be: they used AI to decompile, find things out (with some very interesting techniques listed at the top of the article) but the article itself is human-written. It shows they used AI to help themselves understand, not used AI to do everything.

For someone like me who doesn't really understand this area, what does it mean for those big VC-backed or private equity-backed firms that have bought others, and have debt?

Are they forced to sell? To raise new capital? To increase value somehow (?) to show the debt can be met? I don't know enough to even know what questions to ask. Are they in trouble, I guess, as in, suppose they had to sell to cover debt, in this market, would anyone be around to buy?

Also here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50258521

Naive question from someone who's never written this sort of compatibility layer: couldn't a VDM map handles? They are opaque values. Change the value, basically, keep a 16-bit table mapping to the host OS's 32/64-bit real handles?

Edit: the readme has something very similar:

    wine based Win16->Win32 conversion codes:
    BOOL16 WINAPI DestroyWindow16( HWND16 hwnd )
    {
        return DestroyWindow( WIN_Handle32(hwnd) );
    }

I would guess that's what the WIN_Handle32 method/macro is doing.

We know Grok was trained, openly, for a specific political leaning.

OpenAI, in theory, tries for GPT to be neutral. And, 'reality has a well-known liberal bias', as Colbert said.

Like others, I agree this is very cool.

I live somewhere pretty remote, and every article it suggests is an entry for a nearby village, which is usually a sentence long. There are other interesting things nearby: could it have some kind of variance function, so it looks specifically for a variety of content?

Here I am, seeing something cool and immediately asking for changes. Spirit of the internet ;) Genuinely, it is a wonderful idea, and I admire the concept and that you did it.

I do understand prioritising customers, if there is some difficulty in re-enabling deployment. Right now though I don't how what that is. It could be as simple as resources: perhaps with available CPUs if everyone redeployed at the same time they would be DDOS-ing themselves and making then situation worse.

I think if redeploying was not possible, I would have preferred they automatically hid or revoked keys, or the sites or services were automatically turned offline. I suppose this may not be everyone's preference. I know for my site, a simple 'This is hosted by Railway and we have an outage' (and for our service tier, all REST service requests 500-ing, or 404-ing, or...) would be far preferable to the site being online, appearing to work, and functionality just failing for people due to the keys being revoked. Something clear is preferable to something hidden. I worry that to our users, who don't know our host, when the service is down but we cannot change the deployment, it makes us look like we're unreliable or flaky.

I like Railway but have been burned a little by them. FWIW, while not using them for one service where I felt really let down, one other service remained and just a week ago I recommended them again... ouch!

I feel they've grown fast but may not have the infrastructure fully fleshed out. A mass 'disable all services' button probably would not exist until the day they need one.

> A large language model is trained to predict the next word of a piece of text. … simply asking a model to “think step by step” makes its answers better.

I thought both these statements were no longer held to be broadly true? At least in big lab or frontier models.

No. They did not. From https://blog.railway.com/p/security-disclosure-wednesday-oct... :

> What you should do: As such, we strongly recommend that you immediately roll all environment variables, including any API keys, stored in Railway, as well as any private registry credentials, and review logs for those services for unusual activity.

> All deployments are paused while we investigate. Until builds are restored, you will not be able to roll out new versions. We apologize for this inconvenience.

They lead with rotating keys.

Next, I did not realize that this meant not being able to restart an existing deployment to bring up new env vars. They also speak of builds. I don’t need a new build. I need my existing deployment to work.

It was not at all clear ‘paused’ mean this; maybe I should have realized, but I had interpreted it as doing new deployments or builds. New services. Code changes. New builds as they even say. It’s fully reasonable to pause that in this sort of situation and so I had interpreted their statement that way.

If there is a clear impact from following advice — ‘do what we recommend and your service will not function’ — those who provide that advice need to make that clear.

It's 5:20 AM here in Europe and I just rotated a bunch of keys.

Only to read,

> Because deployments are paused, you will not be able to redeploy your services to pick up the new credentials until builds are restored. We will post here when builds resume with any additional details.

So now my service does not work. Which is worse: a stolen key or a broken product? I'm genuinely regretting following their advice on rotating keys, because logs showed no sign of incorrect usage, and our service would at least have remained online.

I hope that they automatically redeploy their customer services. I just worry that I won't have tested it. I mean: 5AM. Keys changed. Nothing more I can do. Should go back to sleep. No timeline to wake up to check deployments, so... I... wait?

I think OP is talking about inline variables (in Delphi terminology), ie writing a var or const where you use it instead of in a var or const block at the top of the method.

Anonymous methods are the ones that are implemented via an interfaced object. It is a bit odd and I wish they had chosen something more ABI-compatible with a C++ functor, since it would have made mapping between the two easier IMO.

I have a test branch of the Oxygene compiler -- no idea if we'll merge it in, we make syntax experiments regularly -- where all callables are assignment-compatible. In Delphi terms this means assigning an anon method to an event handler would work, but equally for us, lambdas, blocks, and more. The idea is somewhat C++-like in terms of std::function and std::bind but with simple syntax in that you write it and it works: if it can be called, it can be applied where any callable method-like expectation exists.

I'm speaking there this year! Come join. One talk is on a 'Vision for Pascal', some ideas for where Pascal could or should go.

I expect among many other things I will be mentioning FPC's support for packages and this thread :)

I remember that! Upvoted and good luck.

This was fascinating to read early ideas of limited social gatherings - although six servants is still a lot of people.

This is in the sixteenth century, and it's striking how many centuries the plague remained a threat for. I wonder what it was like, knowing that maybe one year, after decades have passed, the plague would strike -- like knowing Covid would return, continued for hundreds of years, but normalised and ingrained. Just: part of life. You would grow up knowing and expecting it. Perhaps influenza was like this early 20th century.

It would be remiss not to point other HN readers at Connie Willis's Doomsday Book: an amazing novel, Hugo and Nebula Award winner, which mixes both a modern day plague and the horrifying medieval one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Book_(novel)

Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50105777

> Instead of using leap seconds, everyone has agreed that they will tolerate more drift between UTC and UT1 than they had in the past. And when things get really bad, we’ll add a leap hour instead. ... a leap hour won’t be needed for more than 1,000 years

Let me see if I understand this: we are losing accuracy, deliberately, to avoid a negative leap second (something the effects of which we have fears about but don't know), allowing our timekeeping to grow a full hour out of sync, several orders of magnitude worse than we have accepted in the past?

I'm sure there are good reasons, but in terms of communication, this seems lacking. Can someone help me understand why this is better?

Where in that doc, sorry? I thought I spotted something then realized it may have been a ‘1’.

May I ask: why did you write that library in Fortran? That is, what was your answer to your question at the time you wrote it?

I have heard that Fortran is very very good at optimizing array processing due to lack of aliases. That may be one answer today. There’s also value in continuity: in using a language for your task because it can build on what others have built. That applies to any established language, of course… but I could see it reasonably applied if someone wrote some kind of numerical processing library today. They’d write it in Fortran and call it from Python!

Good news! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50067414