Theres some fidelity loss but it works for text, because there's quite often so much redundancy.

However, I'm not sure this technique could work on code.

Caveat: I didn't try this on desktop. On mobile (DDG Browser) I couldn't actually see any charts on the questions I asked. Whilst the display of the tables (dataframes?) is nice, my suspicion is a general user would prefer a graph or table _by default_. I needed to prompt specifically to get the workflow to output a graph for me.

On my most recent machine however, I've opted to do this the other way around. I'm running Windows 11 Pro, running Linux on Hyper-V.

The experience has been.... Fine! I may actually prefer this setup (time will tell). Everything hardware related "just works". As per another thread on HN, Linux does seem to run very well virtualised compared to Windows. People will get riled up about needing an MS account. But I suppose that hasn't bothered me too much yet (who knows I may change my stance on this).

The reality is, messing around with drivers, the Linux wireless stack, display resolutions, firmware updates (ie the nuances of running Linux on a laptop) offers zero value to cloud workloads.

So I don't think running Linux directly on the hardware is an absolute necessity.

You can achieve similar levels of productivity and knowledge uplift if you: reserve Windows use for only things that require Windows (eg Ms office, and zoom meetings with a Bluetooth stack that won't drive you insane), and do EVERYTHING ELSE in your VMs.

It actually makes lot of sense in modern development. VMs can be throwaway, you set up them as needed and if they break well, new one is hour or two.

And this model is actually pretty close how server software is developed with cloud. Either you roll VM there, or some set of containers.

Couple that with the fact you can achieve quite a bit on simple set-ups that are adequately sized to begin with, you can save quite a bit.

Not all of us need elasticity, or environments being spun up/down on commit.

Curious, do you have a Windows host and Linux guest(s)? Or the other way around?

I currently have Linux as my primary with a Windows guest OS for when I need it (e.g. Office - I actually think Excel is great - or if I'm doing any Win32/C++ dev). But, I'm thinking of doing it the other way around on my next PC.

I just fullscreen the linux VM and it feels native for all the non-3D tasks I do with it. Even media viewing is a breeze.

That is what I have been doing since hardware virtualization became mainstream.

When I made my linux vm, I actually just took a real linux system's drive and told vmware to just use the drive as-is.

So, it was really convenient to no longer have to deal with driver nonsense, while retaining the original disk.

What's the current best virtualisation software on Windows in your opinion?

I tried searching online for this. And quickly realised that highly ranked sites targeting Windows users are quite low quality.

My personal rank is

vmware

virtualbox

qemu

I never tried hyper-v by itself. vmware actually can use hyper-v as a hypervisor if its enabled (as you need it when using WSL), but its inferior to using vmware's own solution, as I end up with weird networking behavior. it does work though.

I think on linux qemu may be the best, but on windows it is rough. I think vmware just has better video technology and better integration technology, such that its easy to copy-paste files, share clipboards, full screen etc.

> I'm literally running to a bomb shelter multiple times a day as rockets are fired at me

I'm sorry to hear this. This must be a terrible way to live, constantly in mortal fear of attacks from the other side. I will be the first to admit that I cannot relate to this, I've always lived in peaceful/stable environments (touch wood).

Can I pose a completely hypothetical counter-question, based on your own question with one variable changed: If it were somehow true that Hamas was firing rockets from _within Tel Aviv_ hospitals and/or using _Tel Aviv_ hospitals as a base of operations, would you consider it justified for the IDF to bomb that hospital?

Thank you. I will say that there are people in much worse situations, we still feel relatively normal, except for running to bomb shelters a few times a day and except for the worry that worse is coming. But we're in the center. Many Israelis have had to evacuate their homes and probably won't be back for months.

And of course, the Palestinians in Gaza have it much worse than us, even on a good day.

> Can I pose a completely hypothetical counter-question, based on your own question with one variable changed: If it were somehow true that Hamas was firing rockets from _within Tel Aviv_ hospitals and/or using _Tel Aviv_ hospitals as a base of operations, would you consider it justified for the IDF to bomb that hospital?

An interesting question. I suggest you think about it the same way as what would happen if bank robbers took over a bank in New York, and were firing rockets at the population - would you consider bombing the bank justified? If it were the only way to prevent mass casualties outside the bank, then yes, I think it would be (and would be effectively what the police/army would do.)

But here's what makes this situation unrealistic/different: If Hamas had taken over a hospital in Tel Aviv, the hospital wouldn't continue to operate like normal. The people in the hospital would either evacuate, or would fight Hamas. If Hamas somehow managed to take over the hospital anyway, we'd be talking about a hostage situation where Hamas had a hospital-full of hostages. Then probably what would actually happen is we'd send in soldiers and/or police to try to root them out by force.

If they were somehow holed up in there, and were actively firing rockets that were killing people, then I assume there'd be some determination of whether the army/police were able to remove them quickly, before the death/damage from their rockets proves too much. If not, then for sure there'd be a discussion of whether bombing the hospital is the right choice, though it would have to be a pretty extreme situation (since ground troops probably would be able to get in, and the hostage casualties would be far too high in directly bombing it.)

The difference with the situation in Gaza is obvious IMIO. Whereas in a hospital inside Tel Aviv, Hamas is surrounded by an endless amount of Israeli ground forces that have access to it, inside Gaza that's not the case. I imagine this is actually one of the reasons for the large bombing campaign - to prepare the way for ground forces to invade, so that among other things we can surround any building with troops.

I think it suffices to say that quite a bit of thought and justification would precede striking a hospital in all of these scenarios. I do hope that this level of thought and consideration is standard operating procedure in the retaliations right now. Mainly to restore some morcel of faith I have in humanity. But I, and those disconnected from internal Israeli military comms (ie most of us) can't be sure.

The political optics/rhetoric aside, the images that I see of wounded children are heartbreaking. The recounts I've read about what happened on October 7th are horrifying. If the stats are accurate, they are depressing as hell. This war has amassed almost a fifth of the total civilian death toll of the 20-year long US War in Afghanistan. In. One. Month.

Collectively I think we can agree that this needs to stop. I hope it stops. But given the track record of skirmishes and hostilities in the region, I'm losing faith.

If the statistics of civilian and children deaths are even 50% accurate, even if Israel succeeds in destroying Hamas, I fear the collateral damage and the cost of human life will just create a future generation of armed boys who all lost their parents in air strikeS in October 2023. They might just call themselves something different.

And so the cycle continues.

I know many people on both sides alike want peace. But it will take a truly superhuman person to walk across that border and say "I forgive you."

When that day comes, a person who's death would be mourned by both sides, we may have some hope.

Until such a day, stay safe. I'll go give my kids a hug now.

I've found that, for me anyway, one centered large monitor with enough real estate for your daily tasks is better than N smaller monitors. This is even if "total number of pixels" is larger on the N-monitor setup.

It's one less decision to make 1000 times a day (which monitor should this thing be on?), and reduces neck strain resulting from switching your focus between monitors.

Microsoft does this too with Teams. Links that my colleagues and I share with one another to _internal company sites_ get link checked then redirected. Microsoft must have a treasure trove of data about external company employee browsing habits as a result.

I would have infinitely more respect for companies that are upfront about their intentions, no matter how nefarious: "we're doing this to help protect you from phishing. But also, 99% of links are probably not phishing. So this feature really enables us to collect data to track what you do, and perform analytics to improve our bottom line".

Why sugar-coat it?

I don't know about your company but mine has us do these phishing tests and training videos all the time and then we get rid of one of the safety features that they keep hammering us about.

I can't just look at the URL before clicking it. I once "fell victim" to one of our phishing tests because I clicked the link in the email. And its like... well we have been trained by our own email system that the only way to actually see the validity of the link is to click it.

Like it would be one thing if the URL then just had the full URL in it and we could still see where it was going. But no, it is a completely obfuscated URL.

The worst part is, it isn't like it takes you to a page to verify you actually want to go to this link. It just takes you right there assuming you are on a browser that has approved that it can open links from your email.

I really really want to do know what good this does AT ALL besides likely checking some checkbox for something.

There's this thing compromised webservers do where, if you type in www.example.com into your browser, and go straight there, you get the normal web page. If you click a link from Google, and have a google.com referrer in your request, you get a little bit of JavaScript included that that redirects you to another site to buy herbal remedies or fake watches or whatever.

If you are the business owner and go directly to your home page to see what's what, you think everything is fine; if you are a tech trying to debug it and you curl the webpage, everything looks fine [unless you curl with a referrer set]. You probably think Google has the wrong URL or something.

Likewise -- I don't know what a click-through from an email client looks like, but it wouldn't surprise me if there's an identifiable header or referrer or something. If that's the case, you could write your malicious URL shortener to redirect you to www.example.com/ if you curl it bare, or www.exam.ple.co/m/ if you have the redirect header. Curling the URL in question doesn't necessarily prove it's safe to click on.

Also, redeploy configs and reload on the regular, and you essentially force an actor to get an active foothold on your system to re-exploit and persist the compromise.

It's not impossible to defend yourself against these types of things if you're vigilant. You can also script your deployment to the point where you can nuke your site from orbit with minimal impact, and reestablish it. It's all about your threat model.

But yes. Things like nginx, apache & co are remarkably comprehensive in the things you can configure them to do. I find that my most dreaded part of standing up a new service is inevitably writing the load balancer/host web server configs.

No computing is 100% fire and forget safe though.

However, there's apparently people scraping and reselling (or bribing employees, dunno) corporate directories. In my case everyone has firstname.lastname@corpo.com, so judging by the high volumes of creepy ass, targeted corporate spam I get on my work mail... this is hardly a public secret.

In fact, I would be surprised if, e.g., Gmail, does not do this.

Guess I’m going to have to configure an actual user-agent email client that won’t screw me when someone else asks it to.

Can't win in that scenario

It's the word "win" that bothers me in this context.

Until one sees that conflicting models can make "security" a zero sum game, in which your security is my insecurity and vice versa, there is only psychological splitting, posturing and clamour for the "moral high ground".

Indeed, even using the word "security" as a bare noun is a mark of presumptuousness. One must always ask; Security for whom? Security against whom or what? Security to what end?

Unilaterally imposing a harm (leaking of data) upon others is disdainful, but then offering "security" as your reason/excuse, is condescending, since you do not know what my security needs are and how they are prioritised.

When it comes to messing with my data or devices "for my own good" the only proper response is "I'll be the judge of that!"

Many then respond that "people are too stupid and need a firm hand", which is not a good look, and frankly cuts to the core of so many problems in technology today.

Companies like Google need a better moral, sociological and psychological map of reality before putting on their boots and marching off down the road of good intentions in the direction of Hell.

Assuming true: you are right in that it's basically no-win. The fact that Google draws so much revenue from advertising makes it difficult to reconcile.

Nothing short of a third-party code audit of Google's code against their asserted privacy policy would appease everyone. And even then, there would be doubters.

Even if the stated and official policy of Google is to never track these, and everyone at Google is 100% on board with this and will never change, they are subject to being Agent Smith'd at any time by the FBI/DHS and NSA and CIA and the rest of the US IC, critically: without probable cause or a search warrant. The US has abandoned the rule of law and the constitutional protections against unreasonable search. This applies to every single US-managed services vendor.

The decision to track or not track is simply not in their hands. If they get handed an NSL, a FISA order, or a regular old search warrant, they have to start turning over everything they have.

As long as SCOTUS holds that business meta-records shared with a third party intermediary waive any expectation of privacy, the 4th Amendment is basically moot unless you self host everything.

Things might change for the better if everyone can get there, it'd basically ruin the raison' de etre of many of the business models currently espoused/searched for opportunities to implement here.

The Government loves when you build a platform. The Government hates when you enable everyone to set up their own platforms.

These secrets were kept in gmail drafts.

Those constitutional protections protect US citizens anywhere and noncitizens while they are in the US. Warrantless surveillance of communications affects noncitizens outside the US. The US is still very much a nation of laws.

Indeed, the declaration (written by British crown subjects) makes it clear: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”.

It doesn’t say “all americans”. The constitution doesn’t grant the rights, it merely recognizes the existing ones... but you already know this.

> Warrantless surveillance of communications affects noncitizens outside the US.

We have also learned, again and again, that it affects US citizens, too, in violation of the law. The IC doesn’t care that much beyond keeping up appearances that they comply with the law.

These are the same people who ran torture centers, lied to Congress, got caught, and hacked Congressional computers to delete evidence, then got caught doing that, too. Nobody went to jail or was even charged.

The laws simply do not apply to the CIA.

Three problems:

1. The Declaration is not the law of the land, nor does it grant "constitutional protections."

2. None of the inalienable rights it lists are protection against warrantless wiretaps.

3. Some of the rights clearly don't apply to foreigners because the Constitution, which is the law of the land, provides for warmaking.

> The constitution doesn’t grant the rights, it merely recognizes the existing ones... but you already know this.

The Constitution says how the government works. A society can decide to require court orders for surveillance or not. The US government requires them, while the British government does not.

> We have also learned, again and again, that it affects US citizens, too, in violation of the law. The IC doesn’t care that much beyond keeping up appearances that they comply with the law.

We've learned exactly the opposite from both recent leaks and from oversight reports. They try to follow the law closely.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/off...

Since you used that example...

How would you feel if everyone in their neighborhood got assigned a private security officer that sits in their apartment doorway all day and notes who comes and goes? The company argues that it's to protect from the thieves and fraudsters, and indeed there are always some break-ins or grandparents scammed somewhere. Oh, and everyone gets an officer free of charge - it's paid for by the ads they wear on their vests and that play regularly on their walkie-talkies. Would you trust the security company that all the notes, taken by a person in the privileged position of observing everything in your home, will only be used to prevent crime and nothing else, ever?

Back to your example - AV companies are quite shady these days, and their products not all that useful relative to costs/damage and snooping they do.

The League of Meticulously Documenting Doormen on the other hand is a much greater threat to privacy. We're increasingly in jeopardy with regards to implementing that. The more we don't push back against unnecessary logging, the bigger the problem we're building socio-technically.

The analog would be an AV scanner that sends a list of your files/hashes to a centralised server somewhere, so that the company can target ads related to your file contents (or sell your data...), in addition to warning you about viruses.

Agreed that % true positive is not a factor in whether or not to have a given security feature. But it is merely convenient that the vast majority of the usage of this "link protection" feature would benefit Google/MS and not the customer/user (assuming that Google/MS are data mining, which is yet unproven in this use case).

Is there an antivirus program that doesn't do this? I've been assuming for a very long time that windows defender does, Norton/McAfee/Avast too. I'd be shocked if they didn't

How do you know it's not the other way round?

Excel has a 100% a strong-hold in most finance departments. I've worked with many finance professionals who's very first instinct for any type of work is to open Excel. When interacting with any data outside of Excel, they'll demand a way to get it into Excel.

To be honest: Is there an alternative?

I've been looking for a spreadsheet so that I can "drive spreadsheet from Python" rather than the usual "drive Python from spreadsheet".

As far as I can tell, that doesn't exist.

There are read-only variants to analyzed tabular data, but there seem to be none that allow me to do lots of editing in a visual way.

I once wrote a small app to add up all shared expenses among a group of roommates and calculate how much each owed the others. It pulled together rent (recurring), various utilities (from my gmail) and one-off shared expenses (e.g. toilet paper) from a Google form/spreadsheet, added in any money owed from the prior month and generated a nice report, in what ended up being 100-200 lines of code after a few years of living together.

The killer feature was their APIs, where microsoft still sucks.

We could show them that if you put the data in sheets we could mount it from bigquery and process it from there. Or load it from a notebook.

This created a good-enough hybrid solution where spreadsheets could interact with code.

Key word there is low-stakes. I think Excel gets a lot of heat because it's often found used in contexts where it's wholly inappropriate to use (eg driving critical production decisions from SalesAnalysis_JimVersion_v1.8_FINAL.xlsx). That's not really Excel's fault.

See https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/in...

You might find Mito [https://www.trymito.io/] interesting. I haven’t really used it myself, but it sounds like what you’re looking for.