Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

#171

Post by trimethylpurine » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 4:21 AM UTC

mcmcmc wrote: post #169

trimethylpurine wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think people typically have so much choice about it. Everyone is just trying to feed their families and enjoy their life. The job market is a little tough right now, I think, for software engineers. No? I know a few personally that left their stable job to be hired and fired in the same month and remain unemployed six months later. Very sad.

What a ridiculous excuse. People who join ICE to brutalize minorities and protestors are just trying to feed their families too, then. No? Working for Microsoft doesn’t make them bad engineers or bad people, but it does make them Microsoft employees. And they get to bear its reputation whether they want to or not. If it makes them uncomfortable then they should make a change or grow thicker skin. Oversaturation of th…

Do you have kids? If not, I agree with you. Make the hard decision and take a loss. And thank you for your sacrifice.

If you do, I can't agree with you.

Also I wouldn't compare software development for a marketing company with a violent disagreeable effort. There's bad and there's worse, objectively.

Anyway, not saying you're wrong, but I'm not so quick to judge someone by a job that they probably hate.

Or to wrap 100,000 people in the same blanket. We're all individuals. No one should be judged by the actions of others.

Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

#172

Post by vlovich123 » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 4:38 AM UTC

sharts wrote: post #160

trimethylpurine wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The response appears to be pointing out that with so many employees (engineers), it's unlikely that they all work on Windows.

Don’t the best of the best typically work on OS fundamentals though?

OS is such a broad term, especially when applied to Windows which is closer to a Linux distro. Is it the kernel? Windows is fine there as by all accounts the issues are higher up. They’ve had some problems with their update process which is surprising - historically that team would have been populated by the better engineers. most of the other problems have been in the shell and UI where good engineering discipline is not to be quite as expected.

Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

#173

Post by zx8080 » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 4:42 AM UTC

workfromspace wrote: post #124

simonw wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft employ over 100,000 engineers. I'd advise against assuming that everything produced by any of them is bad because of bugs in Windows.

Not op, and I generally agree with your assumption but not for Microsoft, as I don't think it's limited to Windows: Teams, Office (especially online), One Drive, SharePoint, Azure, GitHub, LinkedIn, all became very shitty and partially unusable with increasing number of weird bugs or problems lately.

But M$ share price goes up! Investors are smart as they are rich! And they do believe in this all!

/sarcasm

Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

#174

Post by mjevans » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 5:20 AM UTC

necovek wrote: post #100

RajT88 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talked about back in the Vista days publicly (I cannot find the articles now) - Microsoft has commitments to their hardware partners to help keep the hardware market from collapsing. So they are not incentivized to keep Win32_Lean_N_Mean, but instead to put up artificial limits on how old of hardware can run W11. I have no insider knowledge here, just this is a thing which get talked about around major Windows releas…

If anything, Microsoft has a lot of problems because they support a wide variety of crappy hardware and allow just about anyone to write kernel level sw (drivers). Not sure if this changed, but they used to run in the ring0 even. This was most evident back in the 90s when they shipped NT4: extremely stable as opposed to Win95 which introduced the infamous BSOD. But it supported everything, and NT4 had HW support on p…

NT4 started with a kernel mode, user mode, security model and drivers had to be written and validated accordingly.

9x, me, and even compatibility parts of XP (up to some service patch IIRC? Might have been SP2) would still allow dos mode realtime BS for any driver that wanted.

I loath all the dang software modems too cheep to ship a decent device in a single unit and instead slice off the user's already constrained resources.

Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

#175

Post by viraptor » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 5:30 AM UTC

ementally wrote: post #57

Copilot https://github.com/microsoft/litebox/blob/main/.github/copil...

It doesn't say much really. At this point we can assume almost every project has some generated code in it. Unless you're sure that every single author hates the idea and there are no external contributions. Agent configuration just makes it clear.

Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

#176

Post by viraptor » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 5:33 AM UTC

dspillett wrote: post #83

rafram wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't supposed to replace Windows, and it isn't a GUI desktop operating system at all. I doubt anyone working on this has anything to do with the modern Windows desktop UX.

> This isn't supposed to replace Windows, OP wasn't suggesting it was, just that the lack of quality in one significant area of the company's output leads to a lack of confidence in other products that they release.

Given anything the size of Microsoft, it's not a good assumption. MS has large research teams that produce really interesting things. Their output is unrelated to released products.

Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

#177

Post by TacticalCoder » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 5:43 AM UTC

mcmcmc wrote: post #169

trimethylpurine wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think people typically have so much choice about it. Everyone is just trying to feed their families and enjoy their life. The job market is a little tough right now, I think, for software engineers. No? I know a few personally that left their stable job to be hired and fired in the same month and remain unemployed six months later. Very sad.

What a ridiculous excuse. People who join ICE to brutalize minorities and protestors are just trying to feed their families too, then. No? Working for Microsoft doesn’t make them bad engineers or bad people, but it does make them Microsoft employees. And they get to bear its reputation whether they want to or not. If it makes them uncomfortable then they should make a change or grow thicker skin. Oversaturation of th…

> People who join ICE to brutalize minorities and protestors are just trying to feed their families too, then.

1400 ISIS (the islamist state) terrorists who made their way to the US, identified by the DHS.

https://www.dhs.gov/wow

Look at the list here. 2084 pages already, 12 entries per page: that's 25 000 criminals. They're listing their crimes. 25 000 criminals already arrested is a huge lot.

Be honest with yourself and think about the victims.

I'd say a lot of the people joining ICE do believe the US has already enough criminals that are US citizens and want to help stop the insanity that is mass uncontrolled migration.

Out of 600 000 people arrested by ICE, as I understand it already 25 000 are violent criminals that we know of. That's more nearly 5% of all those arrested. 1 in 20 people.

Where do you draw the limit? You want full open borders, but at what cost?

I read a lot of "Arrested for: kidnapping, rape".

Is, say, 1 in 100 people coming in being a criminal OK?

Where do you draw the line?

Dems are literally fighting so that sanctuary cities do not hand over convicted criminals to ICE: so that one day they can be released in the streets.

Is this what you want to fight for?

Are you that convinced, from your moral high ground where you judge Microsoft employees and ICE agents, that you'll be on the right side of history?

Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

#178

Post by jzb » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 5:48 AM UTC

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #137

simonw wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft employ over 100,000 engineers. I'd advise against assuming that everything produced by any of them is bad because of bugs in Windows.

The problems with Windows today have nothing to do with bugs but with the strategic vision of Nadella.

And it’s the employees that’ll be laid off if the strategy doesn’t succeed because they just didn’t copilot hard enough or something.

Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

#179

Post by petterroea » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 6:17 AM UTC

simonw wrote: post #90

CasualSuperman wrote: post #13

With how buggy their flagship OS has become, why would I trust anything else they release to be better? Or even if it does work well now, why should I expect it to stay that way? Microsoft has burned through all possible goodwill at this point, at least for me.

Microsoft employ over 100,000 engineers. I'd advise against assuming that everything produced by any of them is bad because of bugs in Windows.

Skilled engineers in an environment that doesn't care about quality may become dull, or simply be forced by the system they are in to not care. In practice they are just like us and so I assume they would find outlets in their free time.

I haven't spoken to a Microsoft developer in a while because there are few in the hacker communities I'm around (go figure?) so not entirely sure though. I want to understand.

Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

#180

Post by int_19h » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 6:39 AM UTC

WorldMaker wrote: post #140

outofpaper wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's dumb, on top of everything, is needing to store non special standard operating procedures in specific AI folders and files when wanting to work with AI tooling.

Copilot today supports the top-level AGENTS.md approach as well, which seems to be the cross-tool "standard".

It is a standard in a sense that they will all read it (although last I checked you still need to adjust the default config with Gemini). But feature support varies between different tooling. For example, only Claude supports @including other files.