Comment by __david__ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by __david__ | Hacker News Reader

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> This is a bad thing, not a good thing.

For you, perhaps. I use my open browser tabs as a current "state" of my mind. My todo list, if you will. You might use a different method for keeping track of what you have to do. Maybe you have a good memory.

At least the browser tabs come back after the browser quits. My main reason I never reboot is my terminal tabs. Each one is cd-ed to a project directory and each has command line history and scrollback history that are potentially important reminders of where I am on that particular project. I go for weeks without rebooting (even in the face of OS updates) because I don't want to lose my terminal tabs.

Powering off machines is a detail. They should go into low power mode and switch themselves off when they are not being used. Why should I have to remember to do it? They are machines, they're built to remember things like that. As long as they save their state, it doesn't matter.

State is good. I like state.

Yeah, a lot of this is about personal preferences, and preserving them across time and space. It's not always a bad thing. There's always a trade-off between convenience, automation, predictability and security.

Another good point spolu brings up:

  The chrome/ subdirectory of the chromium project (all 
  that makes up the Google Chrome experience: tabs, settings, 
  sync, omnibox) is made up of 5,343 C++ implementation files, 
  adding up to 1,449,451 lines of C++ code (as of 2013/09/11). 
  It's hardly tractable by one person, and hints to the fact 
  that it's probably impossible for a one guy to modify it 
  alone to come up with a profoundly different experience.

This detail doesn't get a lot of discussion, but I think it's sometimes an essential fallacy of the very premise of the open source concept, that having the ability to audit source code, doesn't necessarily make it a realistic option.

Lots of modern contraptions are simply too complex for any individual to ever claim a hope of gaining an honest understanding of their inner workings, nevermind an unskilled layman. At least, not without living like a cleric, cloistered away in the library of some convent or monastery for most of one's life. Sometimes I feel that the real hazard is that we gloss over the idea that we're trying to exert control over a massive arrangement of billions of transistors, however small they may be. If we were confronted with an elaborate array of ordinary light switches, and told to conquer the same tasks, I think it'd be easier to realize the true scale of some of the things we fiddle with on an everyday basis.

Agreed. This is one tragedy of software in general (not only opensource)

I don't think the studious hermit going over every line of open source code was how it was supposed to work either though.

It's more just that you have lots of groups exercising the code and looking into various portions of the code - if every group decides "Yep, the portion we use/looked at is solid", then you gain some confidence that the code does what it's supposed to. The more groups using/perusing the code, the more confidence you gain.

> an essential fallacy of the very premise of the open source concept, that having the ability to audit source code, doesn't necessarily make it a realistic option

ie, Given enough code, all reviews are shallow?

It's more than just the ability to audit, it's the ability to fix specific problems so you can focus on your business requirements. This happened to me recently -- I was using Apache in a rather unusual reverse proxy configuration and was unable to suppress (using the usual directives) certain headers which were causing problems upstream. I could have spent a long time researching other solutions or coming up with clean workarounds but at the end of the day it was quick and effective to simply edit mod_proxy_http.c and fix the problem directly. Now that the service is up again, I have time to come up with better solutions if I desire.

When our closed systems misbehave, my only option is to shrug and ask if we have a support contract.

there really is no trade off between "convenience, automation, predictability and security."

there's nothing magic about switching your machine off to increase security. It's just as vulnerable when you're using it, more so in fact. I'm not sure how shutting your machine off adds any predictability either. If you want to achieve the same thing just turn off wifi.

For mac laptop users we get the best of both worlds, always state preserving, but essentially "off" when not in use. Sadly neither windows nor linux have ever got "sleep" right.

I do the same thing with terminal tabs, is there a program out there that remembers the working directory and history of the terminal tabs that are open, then after closing reinstates it all when opened? This doesn't seem like it would be too hard to do.

Kind of like a tabbed browser that remembers history and open pages, but for terminals.

I use iTerm on Mac and it has a setting you can enable that remembers tabs and even opens new tabs to the current directory of your current tab. When I restart my computer, the tabs and command history for each are preserved, but the output display is lost.

Let's see.

(1) screen will do a lot of that. But if the system has been restarted, live processes in the terminals will no longer exist.

(2) You have the option of a suspend-to-disk, which can 'wake' you back to the right place.

(3) You could use an OS running in a VM, and suspend that. This is arguably the cleanest solution right now.

(4) You could get really in to process checkpoint/restore stuff in the kernel which seems to be constantly under development to facilitate live process migrations across machines in data centers.

Actually though, in all cases you will lose your network connections, which might be critical to the processes as well. Perhaps re-evaluate your workflow.

I just save my tabs in firefox and tun off the pc / put it to sleep to save power.

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