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.

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");

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"

the conference ultimately resulted in a series of platitudinous proclamations (as conferences tend to do)

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.

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of software, precise and approximate, with the contrastinggoals “Get it right” and “Get it soon and make it cool.”

We need to legally regulate remote attestation.

Google's new effort to DRM the web

It really looks like this isn't related to libxml2's strlen implementation but that you're hitting a quadratic performance problem caused by naive string concatenation.

The Web needs to be stud-ied and understood as a phenomenonbut also as something to be engineeredfor future growth and capabilities.

However, in many ofthese courses, the Web itself is treat-ed as a specific instantiation of moregeneral principals. In other cases, theWeb is treated primarily as a dynamiccontent mechanism that supports thesocial interactions among multiplebrowser users. Whether in CS studiesor in information-school courses, theWeb is often studied exclusively as thedelivery vehicle for content, technicalor social, rather than as an object ofstudy in its own right.

f you look at CS cur-ricula in most universities worldwideyou will find “Web design” is taught asa service course, along with, perhaps,a course on Web scripting languages.You are unlikely to find a course thatteaches Web architecture or protocols

Amazon.com, for example, grew into a huge online bookstore, then music store, then store for all kinds of goods because it had open, free access to the technical standards on which the Web operates. Amazon, like any other Web user, could use HTML, URI and HTTP without asking anyone’s permission and without having to pay.

I originally called the naming scheme URI, for universal resource identifier

Yet people seem to think the Web is some sort of piece of nature, and if it starts to wither, well, that’s just one of those unfortunate things we can’t help.

my thesis on the form of the web browser and its social effects

These indexes are maintained using existing FIND* software.

Sorry, Insufficient Access Privileges

It appears to be a "MacWrite II document" according to http://mark0.net/onlinetrid.aspx

Also, for those who for some reason prefer curly brackets over Python-style indenting, it is also possible to write:

it's like all right someone built an app that's pretty cool now let me go set up my ide let me go download all these packages what's the stack they're using

This would probably be less of an issue making Hugo config changes was something I did more than a couple of times per year.

Browser-based interfaces are slow, clumsy, and require you to be online just to use them

the order in which tutorial authors may want to explaintheir code often does not match the order of the code itself

notebook-like interface

Colaroid’s unique ap-proach to literate programming is to bring together the rich textediting affordances of notebooks together with automated creationof contextualized code snippets showing code differences, and closeintegration of the literate document into an IDE where code can betinkered with.

their are a few configurations

"<a href="http://vorlonjs.com/documentation/&quot;"

404 Web Site not found.

Set up the Standard Ebooks toolset

JavaScript developers tell me that disk space and network bandwidth are cheap these days. While they're mostly saying that to try and justify extremely bad architectural decisions (what's a couple thousand NPM dependencies between friends?)

cranies

NEWS 2023-06-21: The GMP servers has been under serious load due to a barrage of clone requests from Microsoft/Github. Github's setup encourages "forks" of their projects, and such forks then by default pull in parent project changes. Around 2023-06-15, a project known as FFmpeg decided that it would be a great idea to clone GMP in their CI scripts, meaning that every one of their commits requested a compressed clone from the GMP servers. But, by Github's design, hundreds of FFmpeg forks automatically followed suit, themselves cloning the GMP repo. In effect, Microsoft's computer cloud performed a DDoS attack on the GMP servers. After bringing up the issue here and on the GMP mailing lists, some Github brass replied, minimizing the issue and blaming our servers for the denial-of-service attack. They did not do anything to stop the attack! In fact, it is still ongoing a week later. Our servers are fully available again, but that's the result of us adding all participating Microsoft network ranges to our firewall. We understand that we are far from the first project to take such measures against Github.

I started to learn PHP. I am very happy with the language so far. I enjoy a lot how easy it is to deploy and update a page. If I want to update the text on a page, I can just edit the file, save it, and that's it. If I want to push the latest version of a site, I just copy the files to the server.

In dynamic languages you can write programs that take programs and output other programs

only

The problem is that the Copyright Office, under color of authority ostensibly assigned to it by statute, requires libraries to misinform patrons about their rights.

why is a library required tell you otherwise? Why must libraries actively misinform their patrons about their actual rights under the law?

is it really the case that when you make a copy of an in-copyright document at Kinko’s, you have the full spectrum of fair use rights – but if you copy (or receive a copy of) the same document in a library your fair use rights are significantly more restricted?

the notice that libraries are required by law to provide you

And if you’re someone who is fairly familiar with U.S. copyright law, and especially with the fair use doctrine, that notice may have led you to ask yourself the following question: “Why are my rights more constrained with regard to a copy made in the library than they would be if the copy were made anywhere else?”

I always wonder how infinite money would upend my system of values.

A detailed description in html format is included in the Tutorial directory.

Disroot: Requires nonfree JS to sign up

Which of these two messages do you think is more effective? ChatGPT will lie to you Or ChatGPT doesn’t lie, lying is too human and implies intent. It hallucinates. Actually no, hallucination still implies human-like thought. It confabulates. That’s a term used in psychiatry to describe when someone replaces a gap in one’s memory by a falsification that one believes to be true—though of course these things don’t have human minds so even confabulation is unnecessarily anthropomorphic. I hope you’ve enjoyed this linguistic detour!

Every time this is mentioned, the person is heavily downvoted.But if you were here in the 2000, that's exactly what happened.

It would be even worse if no such error message appeared: a URL may also be

Seth pointed out this is useful if you are on Windows and don't have the gzip utility installed.

I question whether lawyers should be looking for new technology, as opposed to learning how to use more effectively the technology already available to them.

I don't want "new". I want established, reliable, with plenty of support, plenty of good documentation. (Okay, so I also want Free/open source, and self-hostable, but I appreciate that I'm probably a significant outlier here.) "New" is a con, not a pro.

The scoping of the this keyword

different versions in different browsers and will never be upgraded

JeagerMonkey, TraceMonkey

Fragmented runtimes While pretty much every single one of these problems could be fixed by either extending the specific runtime you’re using or by ECMA releasing a new standard, it’s just not that simple. Assuming you extend the runtime you’re using to allow for things like native/fast arrays and you define a module/namespace solution like node.js has done, now any code you write will only run on that specific runtime with your extensions which punches a big hole in the “same language everywhere”-argument that you hear every day on twitter (and it really is server-side JavaScript’s only claim to fame).

In case you didn’t know, these two functions are not identical: Advertisementhttp://wtfjs.com/ 12(function bar() { })function foo() { }

why would you even have two different types of ‘nil’ to begin with?

Being able to concatenate two comma-seperated strings without a comma in the middle is such a common use case. I'm glad the JS develpoers thought to optimise for the most common use case.

the web is always stuck in thepresent

linking to the site virtually impossible

daily newssites, will generate many new resources

The former option will preserve all content,but will leadto an explosion of new resources, eachwith its own distinct identi®er.

Referential integrity can en-sure that links always reference the same resource,but what happens if the content containedwithinthe resource changes?

pointing at the correct IP address, but having the server not recognize the Host header