The Night Watch [pdf] (2013) | Hacker News Reader

The Night Watch [pdf] (2013)

scholar.harvard.edu

173 pointsisaiahwp28 comments

> The systems programmer has read the kernel source, to better understand the deep ways of the universe, and the systems programmer has seen the comment in the scheduler that says “DOES THIS WORK LOL,” and the systems programmer has wept instead of LOLed

Chef's kiss.

> Pointers are real. They’re what the hardware understands. Somebody has to deal with them. You can’t just place a LISP book on top of an x86 chip and hope that the hardware learns about lambda calculus by osmosis.

Yessssss.

meanwhile common lisp: "actually has concept of pointers, just called differently", "invites low-level assembly reading by integrating disassembler and compiler" :V

Related. Others?

The Night Watch (2013) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41219779 - Aug 2024 (1 comment)

The Night Watch (2013) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34522845 - Jan 2023 (35 comments)

The Night Watch (2013) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19289353 - March 2019 (10 comments)

The Night Watch (2013) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16188538 - Jan 2018 (1 comment)

The Night Watch (2013) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13954077 - March 2017 (33 comments)

The Night Watch [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12490689 - Sept 2016 (2 comments)

The Night Watch (2013) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9671020 - June 2015 (21 comments)

The Night Watch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6741804 - Nov 2013 (3 comments)

The Night Watch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6735980 - Nov 2013 (3 comments)

This is my favorite tech article. It's satirical, it's witty, it's dense, and it's memorable. James Mickens truly outdid himself with this one - his other works are great, too, but this one is a cut above the rest!

I read another by him but didn’t realize that he has a series! These are great

If you enjoy this essay, you might also enjoy another classic, "Typing the technical interview"[0] by Aphyr (a.k.a. Kyle Kingsbury, the person behind Jepsen[1] distributed systems tests.)

[0] https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview

[1] https://jepsen.io/

Ah, I've never seen this, but I instantly related it to its predecessor, https://aphyr.com/posts/341-hexing-the-technical-interview, which now I see is linked to and is by the same person.

“Magic numbers.” You are, after all, a witch. “Every class begins with a babe, in a cafe.”

I like writing that is still fun and interesting to read even when you don't understand what is being done, and then if you do understand what is being done, it's even more entertainingly weird.

Therein I learned that "Haskell is a dynamically-typed, interpreted language".

I've seen it said that Haskell type class resolution is essentially prolog, but this drives the point home well.

Anything written by James Mickens is worth your time.

I like him a lot. He's kind of doing a Dave Barry thing, right?

I've never read Dave Barry so I don't know. If you're seeing a similarity, though, that's enough of a recommendation to make me give Barry a look.

The magic of Mickens, for me, is his weaving in Comp-Sci (or Comp-Sci adjacent) elements in dense prose causally, punctuating it with absurdity, and then running with that absurdity. Knowing that he's bringing knowledge and experience I'll likely never achieve while making it look effortless makes me really respect his ability.

I was introduced to Dave Barry through his 'Year in Review' parody of the year's events (back when it came in print in the 'Tropic' magazine included in the Sunday Miami Herald.) I laughed and laughed, the way a Bill Bryson book might make you laugh.

He once borrowed the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile [1] to pick his son up from school.

And my wife is so used to my using one of his tropes, 'That would make a great name for a rock band', [2] that she has started predicting when I'm about to say it ('Feral chihuahuas' was the subject, but that's TMI.)

[1] https://www.oscarmayer.com/wienermobile/

[2] https://www.davebarry.com/gg/rockband.html

> He's kind of doing a Dave Barry thing, right?

I definitely see the resemblance.

His one about threat models[1] was hilarious and also scarily prescient. Specifically

> If the Mossad wants your data, they’re going to use a drone to replace your cellphone with a piece of uranium that’s shaped like a cellphone, and when you die of tumors filled with tumors, they’re going to hold a press conference and say “It wasn’t us” as they wear t-shirts that say “IT WAS DEFINITELY US,” and then they’re going to buy all of your stuff at your estate sale so that they can directly look at the photos of your vacation instead of reading your insipid emails about them.

Maybe not the "wants your data" part, but the whole pagers-are-actually-bombs thing.

[1]This World of Ours, pdf: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf

The Mossad/Not Mossad duality is a funny idea, but it isn't true. The NSA doesn't send replacement cellphones to millions of US citizens, they scrape unencrypted data.

They're not going to use a quantum computer on you, if they have one. They're going to embed your emails into a vector space that they can project your sentiment out of.

I mean it's not literally mossad / not-mossad

It's <state-actor-you-basically-can't-stop> / <mostly-just-need-to-do-simple-stuff>

Mossad is just a particular type of the first set

That's the false duality. NSA cannot "be stopped," but they don't use every tool they have available on every mission. When conducting foreign intelligence operations against high-value targets they will use 0days you can't secure against. When they're unconstitutionally surveiling you they'll use http and a large language model. Your inalienable rights are going to be violated by a deal with Google Cloud, not a quantum computer, or even a kernel bug.

In this context, the purpose of tools like "five way secret sharing" is to communicate in a way that can't be broken without revealing the existence of the 0days and exceptions to the judicial process by using them on a hundred million citizens at once. The threat model is a lot of very smart engineers who can passively listen to anything that gets sent over the internet, not Perry the Platypus.

Another absolute gem: https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/tenure-announcement

I'm horrible with names, so didn't recognize Mickens at first, but when I saw his picture on the paper I realized that I went through a binge of his public talks a few years back because he's such a great speaker. If you enjoy Bryan Cantrill giving talks, you'll like Mickens.

> I need to prepare for the end times,

In the post apocalyptic world, what information do you take with you? A copy of wikipedia and a LLM? You get a laptop computer, maybe a 2023 macbook Pro m3, and find an array of solar panels. However, you lost your charger running from the radioactive zombies so you have to MacGyver it with 6 hours of charge left. What did you bring with you and how do you solve this?

> One time I tried to create a list<map<int>>, and my syntax errors caused the dead to walk among the living.

yeah coffee is a heck of a drug ;-)

Older C++ compilers couldn't distinguish between a right-shift operator and the closing of multiple template parameter lists, but few people figured out you just had to put spaces between all those >s.

The old C++ language specification said you needed a space. C++11 changed that, saying you don't need a space.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/15785583

In 2005, I didn't know anyone who could afford a copy of the specification. My point was that many of the other C++ programmers I knew at the time assumed it wasn't possible to nestedly use type parameters, so they just avoided it. I'm sure there were probably a cryptic error message and several toxic message board communities involved, too.

I think hardly any C++ programmers look at the actual specification even today. Once in a while someone will reference the draft specification immediately prior to the actual specification (because the draft is available for free). People mostly look at sites like stack overflow and cppreference.com , via Google. I don't know what the status of that type of documentation was in 2005.

The problem is that map requires two template parameters and not just one.

damn, so good

Reply on news.ycombinator.com