I can imagine the large scale web scrapers just avoid processing comments entirely, so while they may unzip the bomb it could be they just discard the chunks that are inside of a comment. The same trick could be applied to other elements in the HTML though: semicolons in the style tag, some gigantic constant in inline JS, etc. If the HTML itself contained a gigantic tree of links to other zip bombs that could also have an amplifying effect on the bad scraper.
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andrew_eu commented on Reverse geocoding is hard shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/04/... · Posted by u/pavel_lishin
I have a memorable reverse geocoding story.
I was working with a team that was wrapping up a period of many different projects (including a reverse geocoding service) and adopting one major system to design and maintain. The handover was set to be after the new year holidays and the receiving teams had their own exciting rewrites planned. I was on call the last week of the year and got an alert that sales were halted in Taiwan due to some country code issue and our system seemed at fault. The customer facing application used an address to determine all sorts of personalization stuff: what products they're shown, regulatory links, etc. Our system was essentially a wrapper around Google Maps' reverse geocoding API, building in some business logic on top of the results.
That morning, at 3am, the API stopped serving the country code for queries of Kinmen County. It would keep the rest of the address the same, but just omit the country code, totally botching assumptions downstream. Google Maps seemingly realized all of a sudden what strait the island was in, and silently removed what some people dispute.
Everyone else on the team was on holiday and I couldn't feasibly get a review for any major mitigations (e.g. switching to OSM or some other provider). So I drew a simple polygon around the island, wrote a small function to check if the given coordinates were in the polygon, and shipped the hotfix. Happily, the whole reverse geocoding system was scrapped with a replacement by February.
Depressing politics aside, I'm curious about how this affects the long term usability of the telescope. I guess as long as the orbit is sustained and it doesn't suffer physical damage, it would still be basically operable for it's design life.
If major cuts essentially leave a skeleton crew, or no crew, for an extended period of time would later reinvestment be able to put the observatories back to use with only lost time? Or do these things need constant remote maintenance to stay operational?
Silent Movie (1976). https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0075222/
Very much a comedy of the 70s rather than an earnest silent film from the 20s/30s. It's a silent movie about making a silent movie -- in my opinion, peak Mel Brooks.
andrew_eu commented on Please stop the coding challenges blackentropy.bearblog.dev... · Posted by u/CrazyEmi
I did hundreds of interviews for a former employer (10k+ employees) and developed a fondness for in-person coding interviews. In particular I would tell the candidate up front that the goal of the exercise is to see how they collaborate on a problem, how they communicate about their thinking, etc. The problem itself was considered too easy by many of my colleagues, but I still found it an extremely useful for the seniority and capability of engineers.
A later employer was in the hiring tech space, enabling this kind of take home exercises. Lots of time was invested into getting signals as the developer was doing it because everyone knew that's just as valuable, if not more, than the final solution. But many companies using these take-home exercises do it just to filter out candidates. To them, it's a proof-of-work system that helps regulate the intake of their hiring funnels.
andrew_eu commented on Show HN: Open source framework OpenAI uses for Advanced Voice github.com/livekit/agents... · Posted by u/russ
It would be really nice if the IRS would ALLOW you to walk in and ask a question!
Years ago my tax return was flagged as a possible fraud case -- I believe a direct consequence of a big data breach. I had to go into my "local" IRS office and present my passport to prove indeed it was me. Decidedly not nice.
True to form, with an appointment I waited 3 hours at the office and watched the guard staff turn away countless people. Finally saw a person, gave then my passport, and finished in a minute.
andrew_eu commented on Notes on OpenAI's new o1 chain-of-thought models simonwillison.net/2024/Se... · Posted by u/loganfrederick
o1-mini does better than any other model on zebra puzzles. Maybe you got unlucky on one question?
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1ffjb4q/prelimi...
Entirely possible. I did not try to test systematically or quantitatively, but it's been a recurring easy "demo" case I've used with releases since 3.5-turbo.
The super verbose chain-of-reasoning that o1 does seems very well suited to logic puzzles as well, so I expected it to do reasonably well. As with many other LLM topics, though, the framing of the evaluation (or the templating of the prompt) can impact the results enormously.
andrew_eu commented on Notes on OpenAI's new o1 chain-of-thought models simonwillison.net/2024/Se... · Posted by u/loganfrederick
Flexible seat back pockets are easy for people to stuff all kinds of trash in, so that's just one more task for the crew. Inflexible slots are harder to put trash in, and harder for passengers to notice there's trash in.