Former CrowdStrike employees claimed that prioritizing speed over quality led to a software failure that disrupted airlines and banking services, affecting 8.5 million computers and costing $5.4 billion.
Complaints about rushed deadlines and excessive workloads were reportedly ignored for over a year, resulting in increased coding errors and insufficient training.
The incident caused a $60 million loss in expected deals and a significant drop in CrowdStrike's stock-market value, prompting CEO George Kurtz to pledge future preventive measures.
Former CrowdStrike employees allege that the company's emphasis on speed over safety in development led to a major global outage and other issues.
They claim that quality control was not prioritized, reflecting a broader tech industry trend of valuing rapid code deployment over thorough testing.
While some defend CrowdStrike, suggesting the criticisms may be biased, the company's recent significant failures lend credibility to these allegations.
OpenAI is considering revoking access for users inquiring about its chain of thought, sparking concerns about transparency and competitiveness.
Speculations suggest OpenAI might be protecting proprietary techniques or avoiding public relations issues, while others believe it's to prevent competitors from replicating their technology.
This situation underscores the ongoing tension between AI safety, transparency, and commercial interests.
A 4U 71 TiB ZFS NAS, built with twenty-four 4 TB drives, has operated for over 10 years without any drive failures, attributed to turning the server off when not in use.
The NAS has experienced motherboard and power supply replacements but remains reliable, handling over a petabyte of data with no checksum errors during regular scrubs.
Networking upgrades from quad-port gigabit to Infiniband and later to 10Gbit Ethernet cards have improved performance, while a custom fan control script keeps the system quiet.
A user shared their experience of running a 71 TiB ZFS NAS for 10 years without any drive failures, sparking discussions on drive reliability and storage strategies.
Concerns were raised about the risk of simultaneous drive failures due to similar wear and the importance of diversifying drive purchases to avoid batch-related issues.
The conversation also touched on the benefits of using large, low-RPM fans for NAS cooling to reduce noise and power consumption, with some users sharing their positive experiences with specific fan configurations.
A new platform, https://meet.hn, has been launched to help users find and connect with hackers in their city by adding their location and interests to a map.
The creator aims to foster community connections within the Hacker News (HN) community, particularly in cities with a strong industry focus, like Toulouse.
The project is open source and integrates with other HN tools, encouraging users to share feedback and contribute to its development.
A new platform, meet.hn, has been launched to help Hacker News (HN) users connect with each other in their cities by adding their location and interests to a map.
Users can add themselves to the map by filling out a form with their username, city, and country, then pasting the generated text into their HN description.
The platform has received significant interest and feedback, including requests for additional features like Mastodon support, handling of diacritics, and better city name disambiguation.
lisp-in-rs-macros is a Lisp interpreter written entirely in Rust's declarative macros, allowing Lisp code to be evaluated at compile time.
The lisp! macro expands Lisp code into a string representation of its computed value, showcasing Rust's macro capabilities in under 250 lines of code.
Key features include support for basic Lisp forms like DEFINE, QUOTE, LAMBDA, and PROGN, but it lacks explicit recursion, which can be worked around using lambda functions for self-application.
A Lisp implementation has been created using Rust macros, sparking significant interest and discussion in the tech community.
This project highlights the flexibility and power of Rust's macro system, despite some limitations like handling symbols with dashes.
The discussion also touches on Greenspun's Tenth Rule, which humorously suggests that any sufficiently complex program will end up implementing half of Common Lisp, reflecting on the nature of programming complexity.
The U.S. student loan system has created a $1.7 trillion debt bubble, with loans being non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, leading to severe financial consequences for borrowers.
Misaligned incentives and regulatory capture allow colleges to raise tuition without improving education quality, resulting in high underemployment rates and low graduation rates.
Proposed solutions include making loans dischargeable in bankruptcy, tying lending to degree value, and holding institutions accountable, but these are difficult to implement due to powerful vested interests.
America's universities are criticized for contributing to student debt through outsourcing careers, pressuring degree attainment, and lax public funding standards.
Rising tuition costs and government-backed loans, which eliminate lender risk, exacerbate the debt issue, especially for students with poor financial literacy.
Proposed solutions include making student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy and reforming higher education funding.
The AArch64 processor, also known as arm64, is the focus of a detailed series by Raymond Chen, with part 16 discussing conditional execution.
Conditional execution allows certain instructions to be executed based on specific conditions, enhancing efficiency and performance in arm64 architecture.
This series is significant for those interested in low-level programming and understanding the intricacies of modern processor architectures.
Janet Jackson's music could crash specific laptop hard drives due to resonant frequencies, highlighting an unusual tech phenomenon.
Users shared anecdotes about personal experiences with technology malfunctions, including the Pauli effect and the "Demonstration Effect."
The discussion also touched on external forces impacting hardware, such as laptops on HVAC units, and referenced the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse to illustrate resonance issues.
OpenAI introduced new o1-preview and o1-mini models, which show promise in chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, reducing mistakes in tasks with intermediate steps.
These models outperform GPT-4o on the ARC Prize leaderboard but take longer than Claude 3.5 Sonnet, highlighting a trade-off between accuracy and compute time.
OpenAI's new reinforcement learning algorithm and synthetic CoTs enhance training, but efficiency in compute remains a challenge, indicating the need for new ideas to advance AGI.
OpenAI's o1 model demonstrates improved performance on the ARC-AGI benchmark, solving tasks that previous models struggled with, but remains slower than Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
Discussions highlight the importance of human feedback, the limitations of current AI benchmarks, and the potential of multimodal models in advancing AI.
There is debate on whether the ARC-AGI benchmark is a meaningful test for AGI, with differing opinions on its impact on understanding general intelligence.
Saul Justin Newman, a research fellow at UCL, received an Ig Nobel Prize for debunking claims about extreme human aging, highlighting inaccuracies in reported ages over 105.
Newman's research points out that regions known as Blue Zones, reputed for high longevity, often have questionable data due to poor record-keeping and pension fraud.
He suggests involving physicists to create more reliable methods for measuring age, as current data is frequently flawed by errors and inaccuracies.
Discussions on extreme human aging reveal flaws in data, with users sharing personal anecdotes and emphasizing active lifestyles and avoiding vices as key factors.
The debate includes the impact of living conditions, such as higher floors in buildings promoting physical activity, and the role of genetics and environmental factors in aging.
Skepticism about the accuracy of age records in certain regions highlights the complexity of verifying extreme age claims and the multifaceted nature of longevity.
The O1 model has shown significant speedups in optimized Rust code for vector similarity projects, outperforming GPT-4o and Claude3.5 in certain tasks.
Users have reported that O1 helps conceptualize new measures of statistical dependency and provides fast implementations of normalized mutual information, although it may require some debugging initially.
The discussion highlights the evolving utility of Large Language Models (LLMs) in coding and research, emphasizing the importance of effective prompting and the potential for LLMs to assist in complex problem-solving tasks.
Doctor Web experts have identified a malware infection, Android.Vo1d, affecting nearly 1.3 million Android TV boxes across 197 countries.
The malware installs third-party software and modifies system files to ensure auto-launch, targeting outdated Android versions with unpatched vulnerabilities.
Dr.Web antivirus can detect and cure all known variants of Android.Vo1d, providing a solution for affected users.
Over a million Android TV boxes have been compromised, highlighting the vulnerabilities in devices running outdated Android versions.
The issue stems from manufacturers not providing updates, leading to unpatched security flaws and forced obsolescence.
This situation underscores the broader problem of locked-down devices and the need for open-source firmware or alternative operating systems to ensure long-term support and security.
The "Writing an OS in Rust" series provides step-by-step tutorials for building an operating system using the Rust programming language, hosted on os.phil-opp.com.
Each tutorial's source code is organized in separate git branches, and users can use git worktree to check out specific branches, such as "post-10" for Heap Allocation.
The project covers various topics, including creating a freestanding Rust binary, kernel development, VGA text mode, testing, interrupts, memory management, and multitasking.
The post discusses the development of operating systems (OS) using the Rust programming language, highlighting a tutorial by Phil Opp that has inspired many developers.
Several OS projects and resources are mentioned, including Tock-OS, Oxid-OS, Hubris, and Redox, with a focus on real-time operating systems (RTOS) and frameworks like Embassy and RTIC.
The community feedback emphasizes the value of Phil Opp's tutorial and the broader impact of Rust in OS development, particularly regarding memory safety and resource management.
Researchers have developed a VR system called "The Legend of Holy Sword" to enhance concentration through an immersive experience involving pulling out a holy sword.
The system provides multimodal feedback, including visual, auditory, and haptic senses, to help users improve their ability to consciously control concentration.
This innovative approach is detailed in a paper submitted to arXiv under the Human-Computer Interaction category, highlighting its potential impact on concentration enhancement techniques.
A new immersive experience called "The Legend of Holy Sword" aims to enhance concentration, drawing inspiration from Arthurian legend where Arthur's worthiness, not force, allows him to pull the sword from the stone.
The discussion highlights various techniques for improving concentration, including meditation practices from Patanjala Ashtanga Yoga and the "Quiet Eye" technique used in sports.
There is anticipation for a study measuring the effectiveness of this experience on concentration, though additional funding is needed to proceed.
The US is addressing a trade loophole exploited by ecommerce companies Temu and Shein, which complicates the blocking of faulty products and illegal drugs like fentanyl.
Officials argue that the high volume of parcels makes it challenging to intercept these shipments, though some believe most fentanyl enters the US via Mexico, not China.
The debate underscores the complexities of closing trade loopholes without unintended consequences, affecting international trade, drug smuggling, and local economies.