kator

Open in an incognito window.. :)

Downloaded the iso and ran under a vm but it crashes as soon as I try any command.

I'm curious what's the easiest way to test this?

[1] https://github.com/ers35/luakernel/blob/master/bin/luakernel...

I always cringe when I see or have to write:

    for ( ; ; )

or:

    while ( true )

etc.

You just know you're setting yourself up for undocumented bugs later.

I've been known to build "escape" vars into these like:

    int attempts = 1000;
    for(;attempts > 0;attempts--) {
        ** DO SOMETHING **
    }

    if (attempts <= 0) {
        ** BAIL ***
    }

Where 1000 or whatever number is a reasonable estimate of the function's need to loop x 10 or etc.

Any clue as to what they do use internally?

Seems like a construed attempt to make JSON easier for "humans" (whatever those are) but in general JSON isn't something my mom worries about. I'm not sure why something like a simplified YAML couldn't be used for the intended use cases.

I've been doing a lot of ansible work recently and YAML feels fairly reasonable and I can show it to my wife and she "gets" what is happening.

Sorry just reminds me of: http://xkcd.com/927/

Maybe we need a HN bot that links that automatically?

I still have my original copy of Zaks' book in my collection. I obtained it in 1981 from a friend. I did so much z80 assembly on the TRS-80 that I could "see" instructions in a hex dump before asking zbug to disassemble them.

The z80 was quite the chip for its time and I enjoy reading these articles has they look back into the deeper inner workings of the chip.

One could master the z80, I'm not sure many modern processors could be mastered at that level by a single programmer. They seem to have gotten so complicated that they're beyond comprehension in a single person's mind. I could be wrong but that's the general feeling I get. Sure you can be really good at them and maybe an expert in many applications of a modern complex processor but I doubt many people have a singular understanding of everything each chip has to offer.

Or maybe I'm just getting old.. :-)

Check out the nice collection of fonts too. :-)

https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term/tree/master/a...

I've been playing with them in iTerm2 and having flashbacks.

I used to hang out at a "Radio Shack Computer Store" in high school. One day the manager said a businessman was coming in to see the TRS-80 Model 16 he had on the floor and that he had no idea what to show him. I had been playing with it for a while (tricked him into giving me root) and I hooked up a couple of TTY's to it and setup the accounting software they had on the shelf with some dummy data. The customer came in, I demo'd it all to him showed him how someone could change a customer on one terminal and the person on another terminal would see the change. He bought it on the spot. The total was $20,000 with all the parts, TTY's, terminals and everything. Needless to say from that day forward the manager of that computer store gave me free reign. I could order anything from the catalog they didn't have on the floor and as soon as it came in I'd set it up and play with it and then connect it to the floor setup. I'd demo using multiple printers (A/B for Dot Matrix -vs- Daisy Wheel) and other cool features. Over a time I started getting requests to help people set this stuff up in their offices and that lead to my first business when I was in 10th grade.

I keep thinking RS could join forces with someone like Adafruit and create this same thing around the Maker movement. That said, I'm not sure the retail space and labor costs plus insurance would pay off, it would be a tricky model. But if somehow they could capture and bottle up this sort of thing for the next generation of technologists and do it at a scale that paid the bills they'd be back in the pole position on a massive trend.

However, with online purchases and AdaFruit being able to deliver stuff to me in time for my "weekend hardware time" I'm not sure there is a place for this in the malls of America. It would require a massive cash infusion and a complete redesign from top down of incentives and management to even get a crack at it. Perhaps someone with the money will buy the name and retail space and gut the rest and try a shot at it. That said I think stuff like TechShop [1] might already be headed there and they're aware of the challenges of cost of space and having the right vibe for hackers.

It's easy to underestimate just how insanely expensive retail space is in a mall, plus having labor, insurance and marketing costs it would be hard to justify selling parts against companies that have 1/10th the cost in their business models. In order for RS to succeed it would need to focus on the personal one on one wonder and discovery experience. That's harder then it sounds to staff and execute against and maintain margins to support the costs to operate the business. If I had the capital to fund it I'd love to take a run at something like this but it would have to be a big change and most likely the best route would be to take them private so you can make brutal sweeping changes rapidly and get the right kind of people in along with rebuilding the culture and the branding. Even after all that it would require a burn rate on a daily basis that would equal what some startups spend in a year. I’m not sure you could make the argument that it would be money well spent. If I were going long and had the capital I’d love to dig in and work out the model but the scale of this thing will most likely never allow the kind of entrepreneurial sprit it needs to be revived unless Elon Musk is bored and wants to back it, but I think he’s a bit busy.

[1] http://www.techshop.ws/

Ditto that, I often tell people computers are very stupid. One proof of that is they let humans program them. The second proof is you have to teach them everything from scratch. :-)

Very nice, wish it was HTML5 rather then flash.. It brings to light how hard it is to get a stable solar system. And of course I knew this but playing around I realized our sun is not stationary either... It's easy to forget the entire solar system we live in is this amazing mix of interactions between the planets, sun, other debris and outside mass from other parts of the universe.

I've used openresty compiled with LuaJIT (nginx+LuaJIT) for some low latency high scale services in the past. I wonder would this make it so I could ditch nginx and go pure LuaJIT and still have that level of performance? Has anyone done performance testing of this against Nginx+LuaJIT (openresty)?

> 47 percent of the technology jobs in New York City no longer require any college education at all.

I've done a lot of hiring over the years and recently in NYC. I can say in general I've always hired for Attitude and Aptitude. I can teach you anything if you have the right Attitude. I can't teach you to have a good Attitude and I can't make you have a better Aptitude.

One very real challenge in NYC is that big players are soaking up most of tech talent and there is a ground war between financial technology companies and other start-ups. That pressure has caused companies to go back to the drawing board on how they qualify candidates. For a while recruiters wouldn’t even look at a person without seeing some lofty education background in a resume. Now they’re looking for the scrappy problem solver that might be savvy based on their recent work experience.

I find this interesting because when I started in technology 30 years ago I had a hard time hiring for my companies and developed this “Attitude+Aptitude” concept with my teams. Over time it seemed like it was getting harder for people to get into technology jobs because it became accepted principle that you had to hire people with CS degrees to ensure success. Of course that was BS when it happened and I’ve always fought against it over the years. One of the best things for me about hiring in NYC was being able to tell the recruiting team what I was looking for and to tell them to stop looking for just CS degrees.

Recently I took a position as CTO in a San Francisco HQ’d start-up. I’ve been talking to my engineering team on how we filter candidates, again I’m preaching A+A but its clear they’ve been taught to look for CS degrees and Math majors. I’m working with them to broaden their thinking. I think this is an example that in general people are lazy about hiring and they’ll use anything they can as an excuse to not invest in finding out if a candidate is the right person. It’s tough, we’re all busy and have yet another meeting to run to or another customer call to deal with. It’s easy to think hiring is a pain and distraction from what you’re doing today. But, let’s be clear, the single most important thing you can do is scale your teams and if you don’t hire they’ll never scale and you’ll fail. To me the most important thing you can do in a company is hire well. The second most important thing is fire well, let people go if they’re not working out. You’re not doing them any favors and in the end their life will be better if they can find a place they fit in and can be successful and your world will be more successful if you focus on building a team that is a well oiled machine that smashes through problems like a hot knife through butter.

Openresty transformed my thinking about the ability to scale something around a web service. I've built some really high scale and low latency (10ms) systems using openresty compiled with LuaJIT that beat out solutions written in pure C/C++/Java and Python.

A lot of sites down from load, USGS up:

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/nc72282711#...

Nice read but this turned me off:

> A tale of passionate love between 40-year-olds is more likely to be comic.

A bit ageist coming from someone who was 35 at the time. It seemed a bit like he was romanticizing Hackers as only being young people that somehow need to grow up later.

I go through airport security all the time with all sorts of rPI's and Arduino's often wired to buttons and IMU's and various SDR Radio's.. Every time I put them in my bag I think "this is the one that's going to get me stopped". Not even a sideways glance from the scanning operators.

I often go through with things in static protection bags, sometimes big bundles of LED strings and again nobody stops me.

I'm not sure if I'm happy because I don't have to explain the things in my bag or worried that they're looking for stuff so specific that someone with 1/2 a brain could build something that would get though easily...

Interesting write-up, I've been doing some iBeacon research and didn't think about the effect of ranging multiple beacons at one time causing such a dramatic effect on battery.

This seems interesting but they recorder is missing a lot of context. If you drive Los Angeles freeways you'll be hitting the breaks a lot for random people who cut you off in bumper-to-bumper traffic, but the data will only show you stomping on the breaks all the time and the insurance company might conclude you're a bad driver because you're not paying attention.

Also how does it distinguish between drivers? My kids often "borrow" the car and I'd like to be able to "advise" them when they're causing our insurance to go up by driving poorly.. :-)

Reminds me of the "Java Processor" [1]

I wonder if anyone is trying to revive that now?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_processor

They're counting the video feeds also.

Reminds me of a gift my father gave my daughter when she recently had her first child "The Happiness Project One-Sentence Journal for Mothers" [1]

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Project-One-Sentence-Journal...

Yea it's clearly not the most sophisticated site but the tech looks interesting. I wonder if they're just "integrating" something from another field or if perhaps they're a traditional traffic systems vendor spin-off.

LOL Found the API docs here: http://gridsmartcloud.com/userguide/8.api.html

I was reading the post today about traffic signal timing[1] and just happened to walk past a traffic controller box and found a box with various stuff that apparently an installer left behind when installing a new device in the local traffic light system. I looked up the site and it looks like a computer vision system for traffic control.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8166678

While a more expensive computer may also be doing more memory allocations. :-)

I've heard of people who just "GC on market close". In the applications I've worked on you don't have the luxury of a "market close". They're 24/7 applications and literally 90B transactions per day at peaks of 1.8M qps...

Sadly it's not public but yes I was very happy to see how well LuaJIT with Nginx peformed for this problem set. I developed several solutions in C, C++, Java, Java+Zing, LuaJIT and Go. The Nginx/LuaJIT (openresty to be exact) solution had a great ratio of "approachable code" to "performance" factor. I was able to get it built and transfer its use to several other teams without them having to know C and still be able to make changes effectively.

That was a great thread thanks for linking it! If Go wants to be a serious solution in many applications pauseless GC needs to happen and until it does it will be just like all the other solutions that can't play at scale and low latency. If it stays in that zone it'll have to compete with a very large set of perfectly fine solutions with massive libraries and lots of people who know how to code in those languages.

Correct it was the only way to get Go to scale to a reasonable response rate for this application and it thus meant my CPU loading was not even since it was based on the randomness of socket connections that persisted on one cpu or another.

When you're 90ms into your bid calc and Go pauses for 10ms STW you will loose all your connections and timeout your bids.

It's fine for basic stuff but if you want to really listen to full RTB bid stream and have real time responses you need pauseless GC to win. Or you have to budget for considerably less time to make a decision.

Also there are places in RTB where you have 10ms RTT and Go fails ought right in that situation at scale. :-)