Hacker News: maglite77

New comment by maglite77 in "YouTube is taking down videos on performing nonstandard Windows 11 installs"

maglite77 — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 13:16:24 +0000

Does anyone have links to "how-to's" for Linux in the enterprise? Password/MFA management, central app management, the equivalent of group policy, device management, etc.? IME, these are the areas in the enterprise where Windows "wins" with the IT teams, but it's been a long time since I've been close to the rollout side of the house. TIA

New comment by maglite77 in "AI Horseless Carriages"

maglite77 — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 10:30:00 +0000

Something I'm surprised this article didn't touch on which is driving many organizations to be conservative in "how much" AI they release for a given product: prompt-jacking and data privacy.

I, like many others in the tech world, am working with companies to build out similar features. 99% percent of the time, data protection teams and legal are looking for ways to _remove_ areas where users can supply prompts / define open-ended behavior. Why? Because there is no 100% guarantee that the LLM will not behave in a manner that will undermine your product / leak data / make your product look terrible - and that lack of a guarantee makes both the afore-mentioned offices very, very nervous (coupled with a lack of understanding of the technical aspects involved).

The example of reading emails from the article is another type of behavior that usually gets an immediate "nope", as it involves sending customer data to the LLM service - and that requires all kinds of gymnastics to a data protection agreement and GDPR considerations. It may be fine for smaller startups, but the larger companies / enterprises are not down with it for initial delivery of AI features.

New comment by maglite77 in "Show HN: 1M+ animated GPU sprites in JavaScript"

maglite77 — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 04:59:36 +0000

Just tested on an older (2015) Intel UHD 620 GPU (integrated), and surprisingly all the demos except one hit ~45FPS and up. The first one - Big Forest - struggled to get ~10fps, and was extremely laggy.

New comment by maglite77 in "Unlink vs. DEL – A deep dive into how it works internally in Redis"

maglite77 — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 11:46:24 +0000

Meh...the phrase "deep dive" has been around forever, not sure what about that phrase specifically gives "AI generated" vibes? For me, I just read through those and focus on the content quality of the article - "verbal seasoning" doesn't phase me at all.

New comment by maglite77 in "Amazon S3 Adds Put-If-Match (Compare-and-Swap)"

maglite77 — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 03:45:48 +0000

Noting that Azure Blob storage supports e-tag / optimistic controls as well (via If-Match conditions)[1], how does this differ? Or is it the same feature?

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/concur...

New comment by maglite77 in "Ask HN: Why does Microsoft prohibit employee personal open source projects?"

maglite77 — Mon, 02 Sep 2024 17:07:32 +0000

Previous MSFT employee of about 7 years (left about 3 years ago) - this was totally not true. In fact, we were encouraged to make non-competing contributions and I worked with several peers that had very successful open source projects.

New comment by maglite77 in "German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice"

maglite77 — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 23:05:32 +0000

While I'll agree the "eye candy updates" may not be there (apart from marketing-driven AI additions and visual updates), there are some big features that aren't visible until you enter the enterprise space. For example, Purview Information Protection [1] and Data Classification integration [2] make data protection, audits/compliance a no-brainer, and are _extremely_ compelling arguments for an integrated suite at the CISO level.

(The downside of course is this is a single-source stack, which can be a risk in of itself)

I have no real background in Libre (apart from using it, which I enjoy), but from cursory searches, there doesn't appear to be equivalent features available (very happy to be wrong here FWIW). Are there alternatives in this space?

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/information-protec... [2]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/data-classificatio...

New comment by maglite77 in "NaN Boxing (2020)"

maglite77 — Fri, 16 Sep 2022 21:37:27 +0000

It's been ages, but this use of unions reminds me of the VARIANT structure definition from Windows OA/COM:

[1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/oaidl/ns-...

New comment by maglite77 in "Web scraping is legal, US appeals court reaffirms"

maglite77 — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 13:05:38 +0000

Always have been. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_service

New comment by maglite77 in "Microsoft Azure data deleted because of DNS outage"

maglite77 — Sat, 02 Feb 2019 02:25:08 +0000

Disclosure: Engineer at Microsoft

There is an excellent Network Academy video on YouTube [1] that covers some of the internal implementations of the layer-4 load balancers (in the context of HA for NVA's).

[1]: https://youtu.be/oYJBrWcOXfY

New comment by maglite77 in "Fear, trust and JavaScript: When types and functional programming fail"

maglite77 — Sat, 27 Oct 2018 13:05:19 +0000

Many of these concerns seem to not be limited to Javascript at all - especially once you're sending/receiving data between systems. In Python for example, when receiving JSON/XML payloads you have the same defensive parsing layer at the point of entry, but humans can still mess that up and monkey patch a class that breaks assumptions elsewhere without warning. Did I miss something in the larger argument?

New comment by maglite77 in "Why Don't Computer Scientists Learn Math? (2016)"

maglite77 — Fri, 24 Mar 2017 19:45:47 +0000

One area I would argue benefits greatly from this type of formal treatment is the specification of business rules in software. I can be quite insightful to formally spell out requirements from the business, and then apply converse/inverse/etc. analysis to drive out missing cases.

Admittedly, most of us can do this in our head quickly (for easy cases), but I find the formal evidence lends itself well to more complex scenarios.

New comment by maglite77 in "New lower Azure pricing"

maglite77 — Mon, 03 Oct 2016 20:49:47 +0000

[Disclosure: I work for Microsoft]

One thing to keep in mind for Azure SQL: you are getting a guaranteed SLA [1], business continuity and full point-in-time backups (up to 30 days) [2] for that price. To compare effectively you would need to price out a comparable Always-On cluster, domain controllers, SAN storage (for replication), and backup solution + storage.

[1]: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/sla/sql-data... [2]: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/sql...

New comment by maglite77 in "What We Talk About When We Talk About Distributed Systems"

maglite77 — Thu, 10 Dec 2015 02:00:19 +0000

Also, remember that even building a "simple" web app (comprised of a browser (client), web server, and database) counts as a distributed system. Concerns over event ordering, lack of global time, and data consistency models are all alive and well even within boring LOB systems.

To put it another way, distributed system does not necessarily imply a massive research cluster connected via MPI.