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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

I believe that vezzy-fnord was saying that the unix world was not the ultimate in OS design. Therefore asking where in the unix world is better is missing the point.

Off topic: How do you get an asterisk in your comment without HN flipping it into italics?

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But what is better? Even outside of it?

Nowhere in my comment was I saying that the *Nix world is perfect and it needs no further improvement. I'm saying that attacking Cantrill on his thoughts on OS research is kind of disingenuous because Sun and the Illumos contributors are still on the cutting edge for a lot of features as far as widespread OS distributions go.

But what is better? Even outside of it?

If you don't know the answer to that question, then you are in no position to draw sweeping false dichotomies and grand proclamations as you did above. I have no interest in being your history teacher. I've posted plenty of papers on here, as has nickpsecurity here in the comments, and the link in my parent post provides a decent academic summary by one of the greats in the field.

(I'm not even sure if illumos can be described as "widespread" in any fair sense. In any event, being better than some relative competitors doesn't give one the carte blanche to be a pseudohistorian and denialist.)

I haven't spent my entire time on HN reading over every single comment you've made or link you've posted, so I don't think it's particularly fair or productive to act as if it is my fault that I don't have knowledge from something you wrote on some undetermined other comment. I wouldn't expect you to know something I said in some other random place. If you are going to operate under the assumption that anyone you engage in discourse with is going to be familiar with the entire body of your comment history and blog posting work, I feel you're often going to be disappointed.

I'm trying to engage in some fairly civil discourse here, and I am coming into it with an open mind - I am not an academic. Nor am I a systems programmer. My frame of discussion is purely based on what I know, which is mainstream, or relatively mainstream, systems. I work with these systems on a (very) large scale. I know what frame of reference that gives me, and how that applies to me.

I've looked over the other links in these comments. As best I can tell, they deal with academic scenarios, or things that are no longer in widespread use. Cantrill's article is dealing with the here and now of today's production demands. As best I can tell, your argument is that there has been work outside of today's widespread deployments that may be superior than what is currently in it.

It's apparent I misunderstood your original comment to a large extent, and I apologize for that - but the argument I made was in good faith, and while I'm not expecting you to give me a history lesson, I don't think it's unfair to ask that if you are going to engage in online discourse, you be prepared to elaborate on your point if someone is trying to rationally discuss it with you.

Especially when you assert X, and someone asks for more information about X, mocking them for not knowing X and saying that you're not willing to be their teacher... that's just being highly rude. Even to say, "as I said, see [URL]" would be helpful, and would take no longer to write than what you [vezzy-fnord] wrote.

I enjoy a lot of what vezzy-fnord has posted (e.g. discussions of init systems) when I see it, but I am also woefully behind on it. I'd love to put these links together in some way that's good for people to browse through and quickly get familiar with options for OS and plumbing design -- would you or vezzy-fnord be interested in helping out with such a website?

I'll warn you that I have a serious bias towards systems that are or could be in wide use, though I think part of helping systems get to wide use, or at least get to the point of informing current development, is making information on them easily accessible. I've discovered a few interesting OS projects in this thread alone.

Mate, I have nothing but the greatest of respect for you as you know, but this comes off a bit... arrogant. I think I know you well enough now that you aren't, but it would be good to answer the question, even if it's to say "have a look at this resource here (insert URL)".

I'm definitely no fan on Bryan Cantrill, who I consider to be insufferably arrogant and hypocritical (he of the "have you ever kissed a girl", but would fire someone who he didn't employ over a personal pronoun...) but he does have a lot of experience and whilst his views are often controversial, it's probably better to counter them with information :-)

When I find myself in this sort of situation repeatedly, as it appears you do on this topic in this forum, my solution has generally been to assemble a blog post that covers not frequently asked questions but instead frequently delivered answers.

Then rather than getting aggravated at having to repeat myself I just hand them a link to said post and move on.

(and in case you're curious, yes I'm mst on IRC as well, though I think your network got disabled in the last or last but one config prune)

https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

Just found a brief formatting guide that say you put exactly one space after the first asterisk. asterisk space stuff in between asterisk.

Let's try it: * no italics*

EDIT: Ok, space is visible after first and second one disappears. Now I want to know what the commenter is doing too lol.

EDIT 2: The closing asterisk reappeared after I added text after it. Stranger.

It's working for me because I'm only using one asterisk, but not using any special formatting.

As long as I only say *Nix once, no italics...

Ohhh. Yeah, you only used it once. So using it twice is still open to experimentation. Hackers, have at it!

Test:

  I want to say * nix, and then to *italicize * nix*.

Result:

I want to say * nix, and then to italicize nix.

That also left things in italics, which I'll close now.

Test 2:

  I want to say * nix, and then to *italicize *nix*.

Result 2:

I want to say * nix, and then to italicize nix.

Again, this left italics on.

So there doesn't seem to be a way to do what I was trying to do. This is why I said "unix" rather than, you know...

More tests.

* NIX

NIX*

\NIX*

\\NIX*

(print (+ * (i "NIX")))

EDIT: Darn, I was almost sure the last one would activate one of pg's old routines here. Note that the asterisk disappeared when a backslash came first. Did get NIX italicized but couldn't get rid of the space. Let me try something...

EDIT 2: Didn't work. May not be possible due to formatting rule here. Be nice if they modified it to add an escape code or something to let us drop an arbitrary asterisk.

Please tell me you aren't fuzz testing HN? :-)

With a human computer, no less! Just one comment worth, though. No disruption. Guidelines didn't have a rule against it either. Hopefully in the clear. ;)

lol! All good, just amusing to see you doing this, almost like it's muscle-memory.

It was but more from various forums and programming languages lol...

We could use ﹡these﹡ instead. U+FE61, small asterisk.

We could use ∗these∗ instead. U+2217, asterisk operator.

Interestingly, U+2731, heavy asterisk, is stripped by HN it seems.

But to be honest, none of them feel the same as the one true *. I looked at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supersc... hoping there was a way to elevate and scale down a character by some special code to make it look like a regular asterisk but didn't see any. Also, with unusual code points, font support is generally lacking so to some readers of HN, the above mentioned variations will probably render as something such as just squares. Furthermore, one of those I used above mess with apparent line spacing for me.

Ha! I was looking for one of those in character map! Quit when one glitched me. The second one is pretty close. I agree that none look right compared to the real one.

"Furthermore, the ones I used above mess with apparent line spacing."

Yeah, yeah, that's the glitch I was talking about. Dropped 2-3 lines on me and I couldn't even see the character.

Note: We could use the second one in comments the way people use asterisks. Just to screw with people who will wonder why ours are showing. If they ask about it, just act like it looks fine on your end: all italics. Haha.

We'll settle on the second, then.

They look the best as you said and they are also the ones that ∗didn't∗ mess with apparent line spacing.

Regarding messing with people, use the browser dev tools to replace them with the italics open and end tags, then screenshot the result and say to people, "what are you talking about? looks fine to me" and link said screenshot. I'm affraid our scheme will soon be thwarted by other HNers though who will jump in to say "yeah, I see asterisk as well" and then someone else will say "they are using a different unicode character".

Saving them in a text file. :)

Excellent.

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