aryastark

Not sure I buy this premise. For one thing, I just had to decide between DO and AWS. I wanted something I could jump in and try something, and then later scale out. I was heavily leaning towards DO. But then I noticed AWS gives you a free year of their micro instance. DO isn't beating that.

huh? Stop making shit up. None of what you said is true. They were sending messages in plaintext not that long ago. Their switch to encrypted communication was merely a footnote.

Google has a Samsung problem. I think they are in a bad position, such as Sun was with Java or IBM with the PC. They own the platform, but they aren't getting much from it that I can tell. I'm no psychic. But I can easily see Google dropping Android in a few years or Samsung forking it. Won't be good for developers or users.

Python is the language designed by a guy that did not understand the difference between tail-call optimization (a general, widely useful optimization) and something he made up as a strawman, called "tail-recursion elimination."

PHP began life as the antithesis of "goto considered harmful." The idea to embed a language directly into a mix of HTML/CSS/JS was just profoundly awful. Yet we still bash "goto" as the spaghetti monster. I guess we just can't detect irony today.

To your #1 point, I'm going to have to say there are a large number of powerful, well-funded, well-marketed idiots in this industry. If languages really mattered, we would all be using Scheme, ML, or Haskell or something. People are just now discovering Erlang, thanks to WhatsApp and Facebook. Despite Erlang being a year older than Perl. But Perl didn't make recent headlines for a $19bn sale, so...

The problem Perl has is that it is the language tied to the first dot-com crash. Prior to the dot-com crash, there was the AI Winter. This is where Lisp died, for almost identical reasons. When a major tragedy happens, someone or something has to take the fall.

SV needs to continually reinvent itself, so that VCs can sell their smelly IPOs on Wall St. They needed a new paradigm, so we got Web 2.0. Enter PHP. What is PHP? It's pretty much Perl. In fact, it is Perl. Just a highly shit version, done by monkeys that don't have a clue. Perl 2.0. Facebook, the shining star of Web 2.0, is built on it.

But Web 2.0 isn't new, either. The story of Web 2.0 is how advertising prevailed over technology. Now we're entering a mobile post-web period, where we go back to proprietary lock-in with a cloud twist. It's the 1980s again. But it's fresh on Wall St. Better start learning Objective C. If you believe Android will remain relevant (I personally do not) then keep those Java skills dusted off.

The point is the irony. The website is designed to give the impressing that this mock CLI is used for everything, but it can't be seen using w3m/lynx/links from a real CLI.

Wow, you're daft. Everything is, ultimately, getting turned into machine code. Not even Lisp Machines could get away from this fundamental fact: http://funcall.blogspot.com/2009/04/some-lisp-machine-minuti...

> Bogus objects — properly tagged words with invalid addresses that pointed at uninitialized memory or into the middle of object of a different type — which would cause the GC to corrupt memory would be left in registers or on the stack. These sort of problems were everywhere in the microcode.

Go build your cabin in the woods now.

Why would it be a phase? This has been happening since the very first video games were created. It's exactly what an arcade is. We like to look back at games like Pac-Man with nostalgia. And it's easy, since you get to play that game for free anytime you want today. But that game was efficient at separating you from your quarters back in the '80s.

It's more like a brothel.

I signed up for Mint.com once. I liked the concept in theory. But then after an hour of using it, I realized just how incredibly stupid it is giving a third party total access to all your bank accounts. Then I immediately went and changed the passwords on all my bank accounts.

What are you editing a 100 meg file for? Genuinely curious. I regularly work with 2GB+ files, but I don't need to edit them. I use "less". If I really needed to make a change, I'd use some combination of sed/awk most likely.

Any more fuzzy platitudes for us, Geee?

The best encryption we have today is still bound to time and technology. Without a threat model, it's pointless to discuss security. To the NSA, not much of anything is secure on the Internet. There is a lot you can do when you have total visibility into all traffic. But your psychotic girl/boyfriend who barely understands what Wi-Fi is? They probably won't be eavesdropping on your iMessages.

that depends on if the law is moral or immoral. Anything can be turned into law.

there is apparently a generational gap here. There are people that have read The Mythical Man-Month, and then there are people that go and re-live it.

Exactly what happened to me. Ended up using the new iTunes in a VM running... Windows XP. How's that for irony. iTunes couldn't run on Leopard, but could run on something much older and in a resource-limited VM. Obviously my Core2 Duo was still capable of running iTunes.

I finally had to buy a Mac mini just so I could do iOS development. But every Mac I buy now, I just have to plan on running Linux on it in a few years.

$400k would let me quit my job and run a startup. So... yeah, that would be pretty life-changing.

> has an online messaging service ever been able to really turn a huge profit?

You could make the argument that Tencent did, as some are apparently doing when comparing them to Snapchat and seeing visions of billions dancing in their muddled heads.

But that ignores the Asia factor. Where it's not uncommon to find one conglomerate company making toasters, lamp shades, bars of soap, and rockets. Tencent makes video games and they also run the equivalent of PayPal. And, of course, they pimp out their cuuuuute mascot. Since, you know, it's Asia. WhatsApp has a generic-looking icon and no mascot. They are pretty much doomed.

That's great. Until they take bad risks, cry "too big to fail" and finally socialize their risk. I'm more on the libertarian side myself, but you can't deny the hypocrisy here. If a business is so big that it poses an existential crisis to the US, then it needs to be broken up by the government. Plain and simple.

I agree. You have people out there like Marc Andreessen comparing SnapChat to Tencent and saying it's potentially worth $100B or so. These people are off their goddamn meds. They are pure vulture capitalists, and poor mom and dad out in Nebraska are going to get stuck carrying this stinking mess when their 401k inevitably implodes.

You want to see how much eyeballs are worth, look at reddit. They are pretty much a corporate charity, with their reddit gold scam going on.

When people get accustomed to not paying for things, they don't pay for things. I'm not going to pay for a newspaper when I can read it all online. And yet, I'll happily go to dinner one night a week and spend more than it costs for an entire year's subscription to the local newspaper.

WhatsApp is $1 a year. That's great if you're running with a few hundred employees and have such a massive user base. That's doing more than okay, in my book. But $19B? You're not getting that back. Certainly not in any timeframe that matters. Because what's hot today will not be what's hot 5 years from now. We all know that. It's how the tech industry works.

Loren Carpenter did pretty much this back in 1991, using an audience and Pong.

http://vimeo.com/78043173

http://kk.org/outofcontrol/ch2-b.html

ESR is a dick. I really don't know why others don't see it here. He's always been a bit of a long-winded blowhard, even when he's right.

People worked without source control because CVS was not real version control. It was a bad joke, and Linus was right. Without integrity guarantees, a source control system is just a pain in the ass you'd rather not have to deal with. Tarballs, patches, and email worked fine back when the community was small and tight-knit.

The Catch-22 is that if I had faith in my fellow Americans, then we would not be sitting in this deep well of depravity.

If you look at where we are, today, as a nation, how can anyone have hope? We're a nation that finds it more politically convenient to kill people by drones than to close Gitmo. We're a nation that, quite probably, kills people by drones simply because our leader promised to close a prison camp that would have normally taken said people, but can't now because it would be too visible and too much of a political issue to have people arriving to a place that is supposed to be closing. So America invents remote-control murder from the sky. You can't deny that we're a crafty, ingenious people.

Today we know that George Carlin was not cynical enough.

I think you're being obtuse.

Once you start sending emails for things, you start sending emails for everything. It's easy to fall into the trap of not accurately categorizing what is critical (like real, real, critical, I mean it this time guys!) and what are merely statuses. So what happens is everything starts being ignored, and your systems become obscure black boxes again.

If you just need something for yourself or a few people, you might consider an Android device. I use Gidder on a cheap tablet and it seems to work fine. Multiple users/repos. Easy to setup. It has a DynDNS option as well.

This will remain nothing more than a parlor trick. It's pretty much a guarantee, based on how a modern CPU works. You're sure to screw up the branch predictor, caching, and everything else that works to prevent your program from making it feel like 1993 all over again. It would seem like the halting problem would also make an appearance in there somewhere, once you go rearranging how things work. On the upside, I guess compiler writers can drop all their work on optimization.

If you run Linux with systemd, then you already have this for the most part.

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/tree/src/shared/...

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/tree/src/detect-...

No. All binary programs access the CPU directly. Only certain instructions require being in a certain "ring" (i.e. access level). The CPUID instruction is non-privileged, meaning you can access it from user space.

This wasn't me, but a coworker.

We were rearranging the layout of the office. Coworker was moving in to his new space, setting up his desk. He boots up his computer, wonders why he has no network. Looks around, discovers the ethernet cable isn't plugged in. Plugs it in to the wall, still has no network.

A few minutes pass, and the entire office is running around wondering why the hell the network isn't working. Maybe an hour passes, the network guys are losing their shit trying to hunt down what is wrong. I'll give you a hint: the router was lit up like a Christmas tree, and the aforementioned coworker had both ends of his ethernet cable plugged in--but neither end was attached to his computer.

On what planet do you live on?

You make it sound like the midwest is riding around in buggy whips and without electricity. You really think people haven't seen The Social Network? That entire movie was about the arrogance of Zuckerberg and what a special little snowflake he was.

Looked at versioning file systems? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versioning_file_system#Linux). They've been around for awhile. Can't say why we don't have any mainstream system-level filesystem yet, though.

You may also want to check out FUSE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_in_Userspace). Something on top of git may already exist. If not, it wouldn't be too difficult to create something like that.