the web has become the most resilient, portable, future-proof computing platform we’ve ever created

as the ecosystem around it swirled, the web platform itself remained remarkably stable

There’s a cost to using dependencies. New versions are released, APIs change, and it takes time and effort to make sure your own code remains compatible with them. And the cost accumulates over time. It would be one thing if I planned to continually work on this code; it’s usually simple enough to migrate from one version of a depenency to the next. But I’m not planning to ever really touch this code again unless I absolutely need to. And if I do ever need to touch this code, I really don’t want to go through multiple years’ worth of updates all at once.

as much as I love TypeScript, it’s not a native substrate of the web

Web components encapsulate all their HTML, CSS and JS within a single file

That’s the honest-to-goodness HTML I have in the Markdown for this post. That’s it! There’s no special setup; I don’t have to remember to put specific elements on the page before calling a function or load a bunch of extra resources.1 Of course, I do need to keep the JS files around and link to them with a <script> tag.

Rather than dealing with the invariably convoluted process of moving my content between systems — exporting it from one, importing it into another, fixing any incompatibilities, maybe removing some things that I can’t find a way to port over — I drop my Markdown files into the new website and it mostly Just Works.

although they happened to be built with HTML, CSS and JS, these examples were content, not code. In other words, they’d be handled more or less the same as any image or video I would include in my blog posts. They should be portable to any place in which I can render HTML.

JSON deserializes into common native data types naturally (dictionary, list, string, number, null).You can deserialize XML into the same data types, but

- if (!(typeof data === 'string' || Buffer.isBuffer(data))) { + if (!(typeof data === 'string' || isUint8Array(data))) {

code leveraging Buffer-specific methods needs polyfilling, preventing many valuable packages from being browser-compatible

For security reasons, the nonce content attribute is hidden (an empty string will be returned).

wokesockets

this script runs every minute on a cronjob, and rebuilds my site if the git repo has been updated

you'd need to wind up with external dependencies, since you'd likely need to rely on javascript

scrape user IP addresses

say you want to print the visiting users IP address - how would you do this on a statically generated website? to be honest i'm not sure. typically, you would scrape a header and display it

(I implement this second stock Firefox environment not with a profile but by changing the $HOME environment variable before I run this Firefox. Firefox on Unix helpfully respects $HOME and having the two environments be completely separate avoids various potential problems.)

You can see how this would happen after seeing former UT Dean of so-called “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion”(DEI) Skyller Walkes, screaming at a group of students

screaming at a group of students

The important part, as is so often the case with technology, isn’t coming up with a solution to the post portability problem, but coming up with a solution together so that there is mutual buy-in and sustainability in the approach.

You can do this trick with the “view image”  option in the right-click menu, too – Ctrl-clicking that menu item will open that image in its own new tab.

This is great stuff!

Yesterday I spent a few hours on setting up a website for my music, but then instead of launching it I created a Substack.

zero, it is reasonable to delete the grave-stone

One response, suggested in Ashman andDavis [1998], is that referential integrityis more of a social problem than a tech-nical problem

If you think about it, even the callback function in a standard Array.prototype.filter() call is a selector.

his changes

With his additional changes

else if (i === key.length - 1)

this netted another 200ms improvement

we know that we're splitting a string into an array of strings. To loop over that using a full blown iterator is totally overkill and a boring standard for loop would've been all that was needed.

Given that the array of tokens grows with the amount of code we have in a file, that doesn't sound ideal. There are more efficient algorithms to search a value in an array that we can use rather than going through every element in the array. Replacing that line with a binary search for example cuts the time in half.

Standards are made by those who show up. But.. it is a privilege to have the opportunity to show up.

JavaScrip is an interpreted language, not a compiled one, so by default, it will be orders of magnitude slower than an app written in Swift, Rust, or C++.

Tumblr (owned by Yahooath!)

I was browsing someone’s site yesterday, hosted on Wordpress, yay! Except it was throwing plugin error messages. Wordpress is still too hard to maintain. Wordpress is not the answer.

Princes! listen to the voice of God, which speaks through me! Become good Christians! Cease to consider armed soldiers, nobles, heretical clergy, and perverse judges, as your principal supporters: united in the name of Christianity, learn to accomplish all the duties which it imposes on the powerful. Remember that it commands them to employ all their force to increase, in the most rapid manner possible, the social happiness of the poor.

The spirit of Christianity is meekness, gentleness, charity, and, above all, loyalty; its arms are persuasion and demonstration.

Whats the total power consumption of all Android devices? Shaving just 1% is probably a couple of coalfired power plants worth of CO2.

Bare-bones setups are either presented as temporary – something you grow out of – or as some sort of hair-shirt hippie modernity avoidance thing – a refusal to engage with “modern” web development.

The amount of boilerplate and number of dependencies involved in setting up a web development project has exploded over the past decade or so. If you browse through the various websites that are writing about web development you get the impression that it requires an overwhelming amount of dependencies, tools, and packages.

my theory is that you can get a modern web dev setup without node or a package manager, using only a tiny handful of standalone utilities and browser dev tools

Reading through your link I caught myself thinking if I would put up with all those boilerplate nix steps just to add a new page to the site.

compute-heavy

We're setting these chemists up with conda in Ubuntu in WSL in a terminal whose startup command activates the conda environment. Not exactly a recipe for reproducibility after they get a new laptop.

I admire how nimble you are. I aspire to write blog posts at the drop of a hat like this, but I rarely do.

I was a great marketer. I was getting feedback from customers, and I’d pass on every list of what customers wanted to engineering and tell them that’s the features our customers needed.

The best way to learn is through apprenticeship -- that is, by doing some real task together with someone who has a different set of skills.

<ol><oln>(b)</oln><oli>No employer shall discriminate in any way on the basis of gender in the payment of wages, or pay any person in its employ a salary or wage rate less than the rates paid to its employees of a different gender for comparable work; [...]</oli></ol>

There is one particular type of document in which the correct handling of the ordinal numbers of lists is paramount. A document type in which the ordinal numbers of the lists cannot be arbitrarily assigned by computer, dynamically, and in which the ordinal numbers of the lists are some of the most important content in the document.I'm referring of course to law.HTML, famously, was developed to represent scientific research papers, particularly physics papers. It should come as no surprise that it imagines documents to have things like headings and titles, but fails to imagine documents to have things like numbered clauses, the ordinal numbers of which were assigned by, for example, an act of the Congress of the United States of America.Of course this is not specific to any one body of law - pretty much all law is structured as nested ordered lists where the ordinal numbers are assigned by government body.It is just as true for every state in the Union, every country, every province, every municipality, every geopolitical subdivision in the world.HTML, from the first version right up to the present version, is fundamentally inimical to being used for marking up and serving legal codes as web pages. It can be done, of course - but you have to fight the HTML every step of the way. You have no access to any semantic markup for the task, because the only semantic markup for ordered lists is OL, which treats the ordinal numbers of ordered lists as presentation not content.

This is problematic if we wish to collect widespread metadata for an entity, for the purposes of annotation and networked collaboration. While nothing in the flat-hash ID scheme stops someone from attempting to fork data by changing even a single bit, thereby resulting in a new hash value, this demonstrates obvious malicious intention and can be more readily detected. Furthermore, most entities should have cryptographic signatures, making such attacks less feasible. With arbitrary path naming, it is not clear whether a new path has been created for malicious intent or as an artifact of local organizational preferences. Cryptographic signatures do not help here, because the original signed entity remains unchanged, with its original hash value, in the leaf of a new Merkle tree.

Retrieving desired revisions requires knowing where to look

Two previously-retrieved documents cannot independently reference each other because their identities are bound to authoritative network services.

Any addressable thing will have an identifier.

Hard-Copy Print Options to Show Address of Objects and Address Specification of Links so that, besides online workers being able to follow a link-citation path (manually, or via an automatic link jump), people working with associated hard copy can read and interpret the link-citation, and follow the indicated path to the cited object in the designated hard-copy document.

Link Addresses That Are Readable and Interpretable by Humans

Every Object Addressable in principal, every object that someone might validly want/need to cite should have an unambiguous address

designated targets in other mail items

The Hyperdocument "Library System" where hyperdocuments can be submitted to a library-like service that catalogs them and guarantees access when referenced by its catalog number, or "jumped to" with an appropriate link. Links within newly submitted hyperdocuments can cite any passages within any of the prior documents, and the back-link service lets the online reader of a document detect and "go examine" any passage of a subsequent document that has a link citing that passage.

or "execute the process identified a the other end."

Knowledge-Domain Interoperability and an Open Hyperdocument System

case Tokenizer.LDR: return 0x00 * RSCAssembler.U_BIT; case Tokenizer.LDB: return 0x00 * RSCAssembler.U_BIT; case Tokenizer.STR: return 0x01 * RSCAssembler.U_BIT; case Tokenizer.STB: return 0x01 * RSCAssembler.U_BIT;

0x00 * RSCAssembler.U_BIT

Comparing pancakes to file management is an apples to oranges comparison.

You'll likely use some libraries where people didn't use type checkers and wrote libraries in a complicated enough way that the analysis cannot give you an answer.

And, of course, just to be completely clear, this is valid syntax:let _true = true;_true++;_true; // -> 2

also don't ever give someone an unsolicited code review on Twitter. It's rude.)

Another way I get inspiration for research ideas is learning about people's pain points during software development Whenever I hear or read about difficulties and pitfalls people encounter while I programming, I ask myself "What can I do as a programming language researcher to address this?" In my experience, this has also been a good way to find new research problems to work on.

The society as a whole is neither better nor worse off.

Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.

people who were wise from the beginning

This is why I build my personal projects in PHP even though I'm not really a fan. I use PHP and JQuery. It'll work basically forever and I can come back to it in 15 years and it'll still work.

The worst part is that Let's Encrypt is preventing us from building a real solution to the problem. The entire certificate authority system is a for-profit scam. It imparts no security whatsoever. But Google gets its money, so it's happy. That means Chrome is happy, and shows no warnings, so the end user is happy too. That makes the website owner happy, and everyone is happy happy happy. But everything is still quite fundamentally fucked. Before Let's Encrypt, people were at least thinking about the problem

TypeTest(x, obj.type, FALSE) ; x.type := ORB.boolType

IF sym = ORS.ident THEN ORS.CopyId(modid); ORS.Get(sym); Texts.WriteString(W, modid); Texts.Append(Oberon.Log, W.buf) ELSE ORS.Mark("identifier expected") END ;

Check(ORS.ident, "identifier expected");

I believe that comma thing was added recently.

I do kind of wish I had learned about big-endian dating sooner, though. But alea iacta est and everything.

The sketchbook should be workman-like; it’s not a fussy tool for self expression, it’s a daily tool.

(Yes, my handwriting is atrocious, yes I can read it, yes I apologize to all my grade school teachers who gave me Cs in Penmanship. You tried.)

throw new Error("panic!"); // XXX

Code for injecting that button and piggy-backing off the behavior of the BrowserSystem module follows.

Other elements used in this document include code, dfn, em, and p for denoting inline text comprising a snippet of code, a defined term that is not an abbreviation, inline text that should be emphasized, and a paragraph, respectively.

as of this writing in 2021

Note that the use of the text/plain+css media type here

between style tags and not in a script element

  body script[type="text/plain+css"]::before {
    content: '\3Cstyle type="text/plain+css"\3E';
  }

Additionally, with the old wiki, only registered users could edit the wiki. With the new docs, because it's in a repo on GitHub, anyone can contribute to the documentation

it asks for the street address of the lot. I have never seen this information printed on any parking lot in my life. it suggests several "nearby" options; they are actually half a mile away. unable to figure this conundrum out even for myself, i sigh and walk her through installing Park Mobile

I know a lot of people (mostly young men with minimal parental guidance) who were total idiots up to about 25

This is a double whammy: at the time, it gets dissmissed almost outright for the reason that, essentially, "everyone has an opinion", and then months or years later when it's evident that it did know better and it the official tack was flawed, it doesn't even get the acknowledgment that, yes, in fact that's the mindset that should have gotten buy-in.

We really f'ed up the web didn't we?

I think I get what you're saying but I have some difficulty moving past the fact that you're claiming it doesn't need to be a website because it would be sufficient if it was a bunch of hosted markup documents that link to each other.

With Go, I can download any random code from at least 2018, and do this: go build and it just works. all the needed packages are automatically downloaded and built, and fast. same process for Rust and even Python to an extent. my understanding is C++ has never had a process like this, and its up to each developer to streamline this process on their own. if thats no longer the case, I am happy to hear it. I worked on C/C++ code for years, and at least 1/3 of my development time was wasted on tooling and build issues.

It is not unrealistic to forsee the costs ofcomputation and memory plummeting by orders ofmagnitude, while the cost of human programmers increases.It will be cost effective to use large systems like ~. forevery kind of programming, as long as they can providesignificant increases in programmer power. Just ascompilers have found their way into every application overthe past twenty years, intelligent program-understandingsystems may become a part of every reasonablecomputational environment in the next twenty.

A close-up photograph taken by DART just two seconds before the collision shows a similar number of boulders sitting on the asteroid’s surface — and of similar sizes and shapes

This is probably a good place to comment on the difference between what we thought of as OOP-style and the superficial encapsulation called "abstract data types" that was just starting to be investigated in academic circles. Our early "LISP-pair" definition is an example of an abstract data type because it preserves the "field access" and "field rebinding" that is the hallmark of a data structure. Considerable work in the 60s was concerned with generalizing such structures [DSP *]. The "official" computer science world started to regard Simula as a possible vehicle for defining abstract data types (even by one of its inventors [Dahl 1970]), and it formed much of the later backbone of ADA. This led to the ubiquitous stack data-type example in hundreds of papers. To put it mildly, we were quite amazed at this, since to us, what Simula had whispered was something much stronger than simply reimplementing a weak and ad hoc idea. What I got from Simula was that you could now replace bindings and assignment with goals. The last thing you wanted any programmer to do is mess with internal state even if presented figuratively. Instead, the objects should be presented as sites of higher level behaviors more appropriate for use as dynamic components.

Computers can be effective tools for participating in the affairs of the world. They can also be used by the "experts" to erect barriers to participation.

Foreword

Preface

1 3 4 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

A Personal Narrative: Stanford

A Personal Narrative: Journey to Stanford

Writing Broadside

What We Do

Productivity: Is There a Silver Bullet?

The End of History and the Last Programming Language

Language Size

The Bead Game, Rugs, and Beauty

The Quality Without a Name

The Failure of Pattern Languages

Pattern Languages

Abstraction Descant

Habitability and Piecemeal Growth

Reuse Versus Compression

a 1985 broadcast of Computer Chronicles (13:50) on UNIX: As for the future of UNIX, he [Bill Joy] says its Open Source Code

A Note on the Confinement Problemby B.W. Lampson. In Communications of the ACM 16(10), October 1973

(This paragraph replaced a more complex one based on a helpful comment from stellalo on HN!)

Our goal is not to argue about proper nouns

$100,000 at Stanford

JS's birth and (slightly delayed) ascent begins roughly contemporaneous with its namesake—Java. Java, too, has managed to go many places. In the HN comments section in response to a recent look back at a 2009 article in IEEE Spectrum titled "Java’s Forgotten Forebear", user tapanjk writes: Java is popular [because] it was the easiest language to start with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18691584 In the early 2000s in particular, this meant that you could expect to find tons of budding programmers adopting Java on university campuses, owing to Sun's intense campaign to market the language as a fixture in many schools' CS programs. Also around this time, you could expect its runtime—the JRE—to be already installed on upwards of 90% of prospective users' machines. This was true even when the systems running those machines were diverse. There was a (not widely acknowledged) snag to this, though: As a programmer, you still had to download the authoring tools necessary for doing the development itself. So while the JRE's prevalence meant that it was probably already present on your own machine (in addition to those of your users), its SDK was not. The result is that Java had a non-zero initial setup cost for authoring even the most trivial program before you could get it up and running and putting its results on display. Sidestepping this problem is where JS succeeded.

A JSON engineer attempting to meet Level 3 of the Richardson Maturity Model

It can be amusing to see authors taking pains to describe recommended paths through theirbooks, sometimes with the help of sophisticated traversal charts — as if readers ever paidany attention, and were not smart enough to map their own course. An author is permitted,however, to say in what spirit he has scheduled the different chapters, and what path hehad in mind for what Umberto Eco calls the Model Reader — not to be confused with thereal reader, also known as “you”, made of flesh, blood and tastes.The answer here is the simplest possible one. This book tells a story, and assumesthat the Model Reader will follow that story from beginning to end, being however invitedto avoid the more specialized sections marked as “skippable on first reading” and, if notmathematically inclined, to ignore a few mathematical developments also labeledexplicitly.

let's keep a universally understood specificcompiler reference language so that all of us, no matter whatour computer, can share what work we have done

You don’t necessarily know who or what server B blocks or doesn’t block. You may not even know that server C exists or who Adolf is. But all it takes is someone to put a post in server C’s eyeline and they can take it and keep it, and then ignore any and all requests to delete it. Meanwhile, Adolf and his friends Rudolf and Hermann can have a lovely little laugh at your expense in your replies… on their server.

it can start making API requests to your server, anonymously, to get your account information and any other public posts you have

what is expected of them

If your server closes down, and does not run the “self-destruct” command that tells all servers it has ever federated with to delete all record of it, its users and its posts, then they will stay on those servers indefinitely with no simple means of deleting them, or even knowing that they are there. And that’s assuming that the other servers would have honoured that deletion request anyway. Again, a bad actor doesn’t have to.

If you have any objection at all to your posts and profile information being potentially sucked up by Meta, Google, or literally any other bad actor you can think of, do not use the fediverse. Period. Even if your personal chosen bogey-man does not presently suck down every single thing you and your contacts post, absolutely nothing prevents them from doing so in the future, and they may well already be doing so, and there’s next to nothing you can do about it.

a bad actor simply has to behave not in good faith and there is absolutely no mechanism to stop them or to get around this

So, immediately I was prevented from just doing the bare minimum I hope to expect from JS applications: npm install npm run

I tried precompiling the JavaScript code to QuickJS bytecode (to avoid parsing overhead), but that only saved about 40 milliseconds (I guess parsing is really fast!).

The problem with this approach is that output files never specify their dependencies. Looking at it from the other direction, if I modify this post's Markdown file, the only change to Goldsmith's initial data model is the content of this Markdown file. The problem is that this one input file could impact numerous output files: the post itself, the Atom feed, any category/keyword index pages (especially if keywords are added or removed), the home page, and, of course, the archive page.

Has tons of native packages... but is it portable to Windows?

Python for tools and scripts JavaScript on the web

it's a shame because I really like C# and the .NET standard library

C/C++ support cross-compiling through a painful process of setting up an entire compilation environment for the target.

That leaves C#

Obviously, it's not fair to compare the compile-to-native languages to scripting languages

the Rust SDK is disappointingly heavy

What about an old laptop?

Would a newer Raspberry Pi hit the sweet spot between performance and cheapness?

though I worry what will happen as the language continues to evolve beyond QuickJS's implementation

I'll admit that md2blog hasn't been optimized. It always regenerates the entire site, and it's written in JavaScript. On my desktop computer, I can build my site in maybe 1 second. On the Raspberry Pi (admittedly using a much simpler JavaScript runtime), it took over 6 minutes!

Navigating large C files in Vim was slow (frequently, I could see the screen re-drawing individual lines of text)

Installing packages and opening web pages in w3m was pretty snappy, but compiling QuickJS was a rude awakening. I typed make and then left to do something else when it became apparent that it might be a while. Later, I came back, and it was still compiling! With link-time optimization, it took almost half an hour to build QuickJS.

a factor of 10 did go into faster responses to the user’s actions

a reusable component costs 3 to 5 times as much as a good module. The extra money pays for: ·         Generality: A reusable module must meet the needs of a fairly wide range of ‘foreign’ clients, not just of people working on the same project. Figuring out what those needs are is hard, and designing an implementation that can meet them efficiently enough is often hard as well. ·         Simplicity: Foreign clients must be able to understand the interface to a module fairly easily, or it’s no use to them. If it only needs to work in a single system, a complicated interface is all right, because the client has much more context. ·         Customization: To make the module general enough, it probably must be customizable, either with some well-chosen parameters or with some kind of programmability, which often takes the form of a special-purpose programming language. ·         Testing: Foreign clients have higher expectations for the quality of a module, and they use it in more different ways. The generality and customization must be tested as well. ·         Documentation: Foreign clients need more documentation, since they can’t come over to your office. ·         Stability: Foreign clients are not tied to the release cycle of a system. For them, a module’s behaviour must remain unchanged (or upward compatible) for years, probably for the lifetime of their system.   Regardless of whether a reusable component is a good investment, it’s nearly impossible to fund this kind of development.

In a true docu-ment-centered system, you start aspreadsheet by just putting in columns(e.g. with tabs)

Some applications, likeMicrosoft Word, come with a sophisticated customization sub-system that allows users tochange the menus and keyboard accelerators for commands. However, most applicationsstill do not have such a facility because it is difficult to build.

Maybe part of the problem is that I'm grossly under-estimating the amount of work involved in "post an interesting technical article to it once or twice a year" for people who don't already spend a lot of their time writing.

my advice is very much focused on "working for ambitious technology companies"

pulling some code that could be inline into a function allows someone to more easily replace that function

As anyone familiar with software development knows, the difficulty of adding new features or modifying existing ones grows very quickly, much faster than linearly, with the total number of features. They interfere with one another. By reducing the number of shipped features, we reduce the difficulty of modification. Anybody can do it (or have somebody do it for them).The more users we try to appease out of the box, the harder things become for those we haven’t served yet. A more rigorous analysis would attempt to model costs and benefits, do the math, etc. I’ll leave it at noting that the combination of the 80/20 rule and superlinear complexity growth means we probably aren’t amortizing as much effort as we would hope by adding every feature to a single code base.

“It’s just not [sic] gonna work.”

Sure but if the job listings are saying “College Degree in something” applicants without a degree are likely to get rejected well before interviews because it is an easy filter for HR.

tech’s focus on prioritizing output over credentials

Crow and Dabars explain that most universities aspire towards offering a Michelin star experience to students, but what we actually need is a ‘fast casual’, Cheesecake Factory-like option that can provide an affordable, quality education to millions

that does a disservice to what tech culture increasingly stands for today: a beacon for people who care about finding and spreading great ideas

you might remember ASU’s reputation as a party school for hot people. In 2002, Crow was appointed ASU’s 16th president, and he set about both developing and implementing a vision for reform. Today, ASU ranks as a top 100 research university worldwide [1], and has managed to do so while increasing affordable access to higher education. ASU is an example of what President Crow and his colleague, William Dabars, call the “New American University”, a model that they hope other public research universities will emulate. There are a bunch of interesting aspects to this model, but the most striking, in my view, has been to throw away the Ivy League playbook, rejecting the idea that a university’s prestige is defined by whom they exclude. Instead, ASU has significantly improved their rankings while accepting and graduating more students. Given the widespread critique of academia, especially within tech, I was surprised that, after asking around, none of my peers had come across ASU as a case study for reform, despite its reputation among university administrators. So I’m summarizing what I’ve learned about ASU here in hopes that it might help others learn

a paper called the Open Data Model in 1998

If you look at your home, did you hire an interior designer to put everything in the right place in your house? Some people do but most people don't.

go sample from A gallery of interesting Jupyter Notebooks. Pick five. Try to run them. Try to install the stuff needed to run them. Weep in despair.

throwing the JavaScript world into temporary insanity

our systems do not really support reproducibility, mostly due to software collapse issues as defined by Hinsen

The bedrock choice is possible, as demonstrated by the military and NASA, but it also dramatically limits innovation, so it’s probably not appropriate for research projects

our culture and our institutions do not reward reproducibility

Unless all systems are to collect their own data directly from eachcitizen (an appalling prospect),

I tried writing a serious-looking research paper about the bug and my proposed fix, but I lost a series of pitched battles against Pytorch and biblatex

you start by (for example) importing Tomcat

It costs be-tween ½ and 2 times as much to build amodule with a clean interface that iswell-designed for your system as to justwrite some code

For the most part, component libraries have been a failure, in spite of muchtalk and a number of attempts.

only a small fraction of the features of each component, and your program con-sumes 10 or 100 times the hardware resources of a fully custom program, butyou write 10% or 1% of the code you would have written 30 years ago.