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This may be a task where LLM (AI) could do a reasonable job. Of course the results need to be reviewed by a human.

Unlike some other commenters, I believe having alternatives to coreutils is beneficial. Since I started using Unix, I've worked with HPUX, IRIX, SunOS, Solaris, *BSD, Linux, Xenix, and probably a few others I've forgotten. This diversity in implementations necessitated standardization. Nowadays, 90% of the systems I use are various Linux distributions, and I often encounter packages that implicitly assume on specific versions like GNU make or GNU tar. Having alternatives encourages better compatibility and flexibility across different systems.

In the 90's that balkanization was problematic because everyone was reinventing UNIX but with "our one useful feature" (graphics rendering, networked machines, etc)

Eventually it boiled down to today where we have the BSD's and Linux. Other than helping force compatibility with the BSD's, who else stands to benefit from breaking away from "GNU-isms"? MacOS?


BSDs still exist though and they do have their own make and tar. Of course they tend to also have GNU versions for ports because that's easier than fixing all software. So existence of alternatives is not enough, people also need to care about them.

I assume a VPN should mitigate these attacks?

You might still experience DOS attacks.

But only if my VPN is using TCP transport, right?

Yes. With UDP VPN this shouldn’t be a problem I guess.

I think IPSec is also safe as it neither UDP or TCP.

Ok

No.

Kerberos

The new emerging hybrid model of non-profit foundations paired with for-profit businesses is certainly interesting, as it combines some "greater good" principles with the ability to build products and run businesses in a modern competitive market. I feel it may take some time to work out the details of these models. The biggest example we've seen is OpenAI, which, in my opinion, still hasn't solved this model and is torn between lucrative multibillion business opportunities and adherence to its founding principles.

> it combines some "greater good" principles with the ability to build products and run businesses in a modern competitive market

There's also the PBC (Public Benefit Corporation), which in addition to profit / shareholder value explicitly defines positive impact on society as a goal, and exists since 2010 in some states, while in others only since 2022 [1]. But as far as I understand there are no legal requirements or audits that ensure those goals are followed.

Kagi (the search engine, popular in the HN community and I'm a happy customer myself) is one example of a PBC [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation

[2] https://blog.kagi.com/what-is-next-for-kagi#4


True, but PBC's are still for profit corporations and cannot benefit from tax and other benefits afforded to not for profits.

The biggest (by quite a margin still) is the Novo Nordisk foundation, but it is not really a new one. And its setup is rather different compared to OpenAI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novo_Nordisk_Foundation


What about IKEA? It's smaller than Novo Nordisk, but they also use a non-profit parent company, which is admittedly a bit bizarre.

My experience interacting with Novo Nordisk is that, in their case, this model has led to massive inefficiencies.

The non-profit aspect has led to lots of internal politics and rigged hires. They are much more inefficient than a classical pharma.


> What about IKEA? It's smaller than Novo Nordisk, but they also use a non-profit parent company, which is admittedly a bit bizarre.

Smells like tax evasion, but what do i know. Isn't IKEAs founder one of the richest people in Swiss?


Yes, indeed. IKEA's non-profit parent is headquartered in NL, and it is obviously a tax evasion scheme.

Sweden is not Switzerland. And he died almost ten years ago.

He lived in Switzerland for over 40 years.

Is IKEA smaller than Novo Nordisk?

In practice, maybe not, but Novo Nordisk's current market cap is much bigger. In terms of revenue, I think they are on the same order of magnitude?

Novo Nordisk might return to a more realistic market cap once other GLP-1 agonists enter the market, e.g. Lilly's.


I agree we'll need to work out the kinks, but the big difference is it's hard to see a path towards a gazillion $$$ upside for Proton, while with OpenAI it seemed inevitable. Maybe the AI/ML space will be perfect for a hybrid organization in 30-50 years?

how about mozilla? I believe it's been running with such a setup (foundation+corporation) for a long time.

databricks too, the commercialization arm of the Apache Spark people

One consideration in choosing a proof assistant is the type of proofs you are doing. For example, mathematicians often lean towards Lean (pun intended), while those in programming languages favour Coq or Isabelle, among others.


Okay, they could not be held accountable for contract breach because there is a small print somewhere in a FAQ linked from TOS, but perhaps they could be sued for misleading advertisement? One car reasonably argue that "the price will never increase" is not the same as "if the price increases they will pay the final month".


I love that they use machinelearning.apple.com not ai.apple.com


For the majority of the keynote they explicitly avoided the word AI instead substituting the word Intelligence, then Apple Intelligence, and then towards the end they said AI and ChatGPT once or twice.

I think they saw the response to all the AI shoveling and Microsoft Recall and executed a fantastic strategy to reposition themselves in industry discussions. I still have tons of reservations about privacy and what this will all look like in a few years, but you really have to take your hat off to them. WWDC has been awesome and it makes me excited to develop for their platform in a way I haven't felt in a very, very, long time.


> executed a fantastic strategy to reposition themselves in industry discussions

Just the usual marketing angle, IMO. It's not TV, it's HBO.

No one is reluctant to use the word smartphone to include iPhones. I don't think anyone is going to use the Apple Intelligence moniker except in the same cases where they'd say iCloud instead of cloud services.

It's also a little clunky. Maybe they could have gone with... xI? Too close to the Chinese Xi. iAI? Sounds like the Spanish "ay ay ay." Not an easy one I think. The number of person-hours spent on this must have been something.


I don't think they actually expect "Apple Intelligence" to enter popular vernacular. I think it was more to drive home the distinction between what Apple is doing and what everybody else is doing.


> distinction between what Apple is doing and what everybody else is doing

it is artificial intelligence, applied intelligently.

In Apple's case: "personalised AI system"


correct. last year instead of VR they went with Spatial Intelligence


Vision Pro isn't really designed to be a VR device first and foremost. The primary usecase is the passthrough mode whereas VR usually describes the software putting you in a different place.


"spatial computing"


> makes me excited to develop for their platform in a way I haven't felt in a very, very, long time

AI will ultimately do all the 'development', and will replace all apps. The integrations are going to be a temporary measure. Only apps that will survive are the ones that control things that apple cannot control (ie. how Uber controls its fleet)


Perhaps. It will be exciting to see if/how that happens. It does seem relatively far off still. At least some years.


What excites you specifically as a developer?


For the last 10 years I've been a full stack / devops developer. I think that ecosystem is in a very bad place right now and has failed to efficiently modernize. The tools that people are adopting in an attempt to mitigate this such as NextJS are still grounded in the complexities of the past like Node/React/Express/Serverless and not good enough.

These troubles metastasize to subpar SaaS products, low efficiency, bad company cultures, layoffs, bad hiring practices, management instead of leadership, salary stagnation, dark patterns, you name it.

So to see Apple with a laser focus on tooling, quality of life, privacy, in this WWDC while everyone else runs around like a headless chicken suggests to me that their platform might be the more lucrative path to follow. I think it'll be faster, better, and more enjoyable, to develop consumer and business applications for fun and profit.

Don't get be wrong its far from a silver bullet. Many Apple Platform APIs like CloudKit and Server-side-Swift have a LONG way to go. But Im seeing the right steps to address these issues and at the end of the day it feels a whole lot better then what I've been doing in the past and produces better end products IMO.


glad someone sane is in charge in cupertino


Apple Intelligence.


Waiting for aiPhone in a few iterations </troll>


Yeah they probably were still working on the last buzzword


Look like a nice, very polished product. It is a commercial product with free Community Edition. Unfortunately for me the restriction on not supporting Yubikey ssh authentication on free edition is a show stopper. I do not consider Yubikey to be "commercial" feature - I use with my private computers.


> I do not consider Yubikey to be "commercial" feature - I use with my private computers.

Unpopular opinion - if you have information on your private computers that's sensitive enough to warrant a yubikey then you most certainly would WANT to pay a company to ensure the software is well maintained. Did you balk at the price of a yubikey when you made that purchase?


A Yubikey is very convenient to use to carry around keys between several computers in a relatively safe way. One can use it because of its practical side rather than because they have super sensitive data on their home computers.


The "free" in free software is not related to what you would pay to have it maintained.


Alright thanks for the feedback on the yubikey. I assumed that yubikeys would be found pretty much only in enterprise environments but perhaps I was wrong there.

Maybe I can find a solution to that. The free plan restrictions are not perfect yet and I was planning to experiment with different solutions to it.


I had a similar thought when looking at the Pricing FAQ section "Where is the differentiation between non-commercial and commercial systems?", which lists among other things Proxmox VE, which itself is open source and anybody is free to use it for free without commercial support. Lots of people use it for homelab-type things, or in academic or test environments.

Would you consider detecting whether each PVE instance the user connects to is a licensed / subscription-supported instance, and allowing non-licensed XPipe to connect to non-licensed PVE instances? There is an API for it already, see the 'level' field in https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/api-viewer/index.html#/clus... .


Yeah the Proxmox limitation originally came about because I didn't find a reliable way to detect enterprise use from the CLI (But I had not used Proxmox before implementing that, so I might have missed it).

But if I see this correctly, I could call the API from the command-line with this: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Proxmox_VE_API#Using_'pvesh'_to... and check the response. If that is possible I can definitely change that limitation.


To the latter point: yes, and each API page contains both the HTTP endpoint to curl and also the pvesh command to run


Same for Amazon Linux and Azure/EKS and AKS. I would understand if this were targeted towards a general consumer, but if it's targeting techies then precluding two of the biggest cloud services in the world is... certainly a choice.

Doubly so on Yubikey/GPG/PKCS11 support. Enhanced security should never be behind a paywall, IMO.

A better approach might be number of machines instead of this detection.


The original idea was that since the systems you listed usually cost quite a bit of money to run, these would primarily be run in an enterprise context. I don't think I could afford hosting a managed kubernetes cluster and multiple decent servers in Amazon or Azure for personal use.

The Yubikey security argument is fair though, I will reconsider that.

The number of machines detection has been on my TODO list for a while, but it's a little bit tricky to implement with the current implementation.


This is a challenging thing to get right. It's interesting seeing your back and forth with the other commenters on here.


I think you're good wrt the AWS/EKS cloud stuff fwiw. You'll always have beggars coming.

If the user can afford the enterprise costs of those, they can certainly afford paying for xpipe?

Discount for individuals actually managing their own infra sounds like a reasonable place to draw the line.

Probably a lot of shadow IT around where the employer pays for all the big cloud stuff and employees either can't or won't bother getting the software side of their work tools paid for.

(As for me, I'm one of those annoying FLOSS maximalists so I won't be interested without the source under a reasonable license and I'm able to compile it locally without spending a week spelunking in undocumented build scripts. But hey, I wish you the best and don't be afraid to charge properly. It's easier to lower prices than raise them if you catch my drift)


Same, I also use Yubikeys for personal use.


Such a missed opportunity to cite "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" in References section!


It's a longer story, but the gist is that one night I got a call saying some code I'd written wasn’t working properly, and they wanted me to come and fix it. When I tried to refuse, I was told they would send someone to break down my door and drag me, kicking and screaming, to fix it. The threat was very real. This was an important lesson for me: you should always be ready to take responsibility for what you write.


I guess I'm interested in hearing why you think your employer would actually break your door and drag you to fix a bug. Was it a mafia organisation or something?


It was in the nineties, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, and there was a fair amount of lawlessness. Many shops had their own security, often from criminal organizations. The shop I wrote accounting software for had such goons on the payroll.


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