rudolfwinestock

See also The Official Rules and Explanations, compiled by Paul Dickson.

https://www.bookfinder.com/book/The_Official_Rules_and_Expla...

Merry Christmas, Hacker News.

To put everyone in the proper mood, here are the Commodore 64 Christmas demos: https://rittwage.com/c64pp/?pg=xmas

I've lost the original reference, but Joe Marshall once wrote in comp.lang.lisp:

Here's an anecdote I heard once about Minsky. He was showing a student how to use ITS to write a program. ITS was an unusual operating system in that the 'shell' was the DDT debugger. You ran programs by loading them into memory and jumping to the entry point. But you can also just start writing assembly code directly into memory from the DDT prompt. Minsky started with the null program. Obviously, it needs an entry point, so he defined a label for that. He then told the debugger to jump to that label. This immediately raised an error of there being no code at the jump target. So he wrote a few lines of code and restarted the jump instruction. This time it succeeded and the first few instructions were executed. When the debugger again halted, he looked at the register contents and wrote a few more lines. Again proceeding from where he left off he watched the program run the few more instructions. He developed the entire program by 'debugging' the null program.

Sabine Hossenfelder and her weblog have been featured on Hacker News before.

https://backreaction.blogspot.com/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15464576

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19123099

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21802674

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22033864

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24374602

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24866927

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25140588

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25229677

And she's well-vetted: https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2021/05/16/sabine-hossenf...

Here are more examples.

https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/new-york/sunken-town-ny/

The state of New York has several towns submerged under artificial lakes created to give water to New York City.

On the one hand, I'm glad that there's more public effort in developing user interfaces beyond what's 'standard,' today. It indicates that "the market" senses the need. I applaud this venture.

On the other hand, they could start by not using such an eye-searing color scheme for their website.

For those too lazy to click:

“In response to current events concerning the Freenode Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network, we would like to invite you to a community meeting on the future of both the FSF and GNU's official IRC channels.

“The meeting will be held in the #fsf channel on the Freenode network on Thursday, May 27 from 13:00-14:30 EDT (17:00-18:30 UTC). The discussion will be moderated by members of the FSF staff, as well as GNU webmasters Amin Bandali and Jason Self.”

Nice of them to host the discussion on Freenode, itself.

It's saving face. Robert McNamara was several different kinds of fool. JFK & LBJ were even bigger fools for keeping him as SecDef.

Later, when Nixon became president, the situation changed for the better, but it was a slog. Nixon had promised the South Vietnamese premier better terms than what LBJ was offering, but, by the time he came into office, the situation had gotten so bad that it was all that he could do just to guarantee South Vietnam's existence.

Nevertheless, the situation stabilized. The North Vietnamese army was pushed out of South Vietnam. Nixon got the North to sign a cease-fire agreement, which the North (being perfidious communists) violated.

And the South Vietnamese army got good enough that, after Nixon had pulled American ground troops out of the area, South Vietnam was able to defend itself from North Vietnamese aggression, for a while.

In 1972, North Vietnam sent 150,000 troops—along with columns of tanks from the Soviet Union—to invade South Vietnam. The latter had American air support, but only its own troops on the ground.

Result: Less than a third of North Vietnam's invasion force made it back north. Roughly 650 Americans were KIA in a campaign as big as the Battle of Kharkov. The Army of the Republic of Vietnam had won, big time.

Then, Watergate happened.

In 1975, North Vietnam—violating the cease-fire agreement AGAIN—launched another invasion of South Vietnam. The Soviet Union continued to support North Vietnam. The Congress of the United States of America pulled all support from South Vietnam.

Result: Yet another workers' paradise blighting the history of the twentieth century. And the kind of gloating you can see in this discussion thread.

Those responsible for what happened there received due process of law and were punished.

Communists, on the other hand, either suppress or celebrate their own atrocities.

To add to the above, as much as some people want to mock America's involvement in Vietnam, one must note that The Domino Theory (used to justify that involvement) came true.

Granted, the worst case scenario did not happen (Australia was spared communist takeover), but what actually happened was horrific, nonetheless. Laos and Cambodia fell to communism, in part thanks to communist forces from Vietnam.

And anyone who pulls the line of "independence from foreign domination" should have a talk with the grey hairs in your local Vietnamese neighborhood, here, in the States. They'll let you know how much people in South Vietnam wanted nothing to do with the tyrannical regime in the North.

Furthermore, one cannot disparage South Vietnam as a puppet regime without also disparaging South Korea, Taiwan, or West Germany for that matter.

As the parent post noted, that development comes from having American jobs exported there (e.g., those Nike factories). Being a socialist society, the wealth disparities are far more stark than what we have in the West.

The real purpose of most taxes on "the rich" is to prevent the middle class from accumulating capital.

The truly rich, by virtue of being actually wealthy, can structure their finances to avoid most of the worst taxes. Up-and-coming strivers can't do that.

TinyDevCRM is an open source alternative.

https://tinydevcrm.com/

The Internet interprets the absence of censorship as wickedness and attacks it.

I've noticed that people only speak highly of COBOL, as a technology, when Grace Murray Hopper's name occurs nearby.

That's all that I need to know about COBOL.

“An nescis, fili mi, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur?”

“Do you not know, my son, with how little prudence the world is ruled?”

Scandinavian nobility still used Latin commonly in those days.

Private forums.

By that, I mean forums that only show their content to members who have created an account. Some of them may have a vetting process that can include paying money for the upkeep of the site.

Finding such forums is a problem in itself, and I can't help you, there.

A “government information bureau?”

Wow! Another bureaucracy that'll have its own factions with their own agendas that will never work against either their superiors or the electorate.

Holding a press conference means that the message gets filtered through media companies with their own agendas (OAN or CNN; pick your poison).

The Internet is meant to dis-intermediate communication. That is its purpose. It's one of the things that makes it such a disruptive change over legacy media platforms. The current de-platforming trend is an attempt to put that genie back in the bottle.

That bakery likely has a staff of two people and a dozen competitors offering equivalent services within a few miles.

On the other hand, the public square, itself, has been privatized into the hands of multi-billion-dollar corporations from whom there is no appeal.

Nobody actually needs a cake. But a head of state needs to talk to his citizens and his citizens need to hear him, even if we think he is a [insert epithet, here].

Nitpick: The article on Hunter Biden which Twitter blocked came from the New York Post rather than the New York Times.

Furthermore, the Right being more permissive with respect to public speech is true, but rather recent. Historically, the Right tended to argue for the moral legitimacy of censorship whereas the Left tended to call any such effort a step towards tyranny.

Our current trends are very unusual, historically speaking.

Session management is one. In Unix, programs like GNU screen or tmux are needed for that. In most DEC operating systems, it was built into the system.

Another feature of the Tenex line of operating systems (and others of that era) was that the command shell also served as a 'system monitor,' like some of the 8-bit computers had. In other words, the CLI was also a rudimentary debugger.

An example of this was explained by Gerald Sussman. He told a story of how Marvin Minsky walked a student through making a full-featured program at the command line on an ITS system at the MIT AI Lab (or was it the Media Lab?).

Minsky simply made a program that consisted of nothing but the assembly language RETURN statement. Running that program brought the system back to the shell. Minsky then added a few more instructions to that program; not much, but enough to keep it in a working state. Then, Minsky—from the command line—examined the contents of certain registers, and incorporated them into the next few assembly language instructions which he added to the program.

At each stage of that loop, Minsky always had a working program. So, from the command line, one could develop an assembly language program in an environment that was more dynamic and responsive than that offered by many modern development environments for modern languages.

A few years ago, I met a former DEC guy. I told him the story of how Cisco Systems got its start by running bootleg versions of the TOPS-10 operating system on its very first routers. Even with the overhead of emulation, Unix of that time simply didn't have what it took to do the job under those hardware constraints. Later, Cisco came clean to DEC.

The guy hadn't heard that story, but he did remember that DEC got a really sweet deal on Cisco hardware.

A lot of ideas from DEC operating systems are due for resurrection.

Tangentially related to this is SDF's Anonradio.

https://anonradio.net/

“All DJs on aNONradio.net are members of the SDF Public Access UNIX System Community. Please join our growing online community of free software authors, teachers, librarians, students, researchers, hobbyists, computer enthusiasts, artists, musicians, and the aural and the visually impaired. We fight for and promote the distribution and development of free software and the non-commercialization of the Internet.”

The focus of this is music rather than talk.

The Internet interprets the absence of censorship as weakness or wickedness, and attacks it.

The following is a relevant quote from Clay Shirky.

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2013/11/healthcare-gov-and-the-...

Back in the mid-1990s, I did a lot of web work for traditional media. That often meant figuring out what the client was already doing on the web, and how it was going, so I’d find the techies in the company, and ask them what they were doing, and how it was going. Then I’d tell management what I’d learned. This always struck me as a waste of my time and their money; I was like an overpaid bike messenger, moving information from one part of the firm to another. I didn’t understand the job I was doing until one meeting at a magazine company.

The thing that made this meeting unusual was that one of their programmers had been invited to attend, so management could outline their web strategy to him. After the executives thanked me for explaining what I’d learned from log files given me by their own employees just days before, the programmer leaned forward and said “You know, we have all that information downstairs, but nobody’s ever asked us for it.”

I remember thinking “Oh, finally!” I figured the executives would be relieved this information was in-house, delighted that their own people were on it, maybe even mad at me for charging an exorbitant markup on local knowledge. Then I saw the look on their faces as they considered the programmer’s offer. The look wasn’t delight, or even relief, but contempt. The situation suddenly came clear: I was getting paid to save management from the distasteful act of listening to their own employees.

In the early days of print, you had to understand the tech to run the organization. (Ben Franklin, the man who made America a media hothouse, called himself Printer.) But in the 19th century, the printing press became domesticated. Printers were no longer senior figures—they became blue-collar workers. And the executive suite no longer interacted with them much, except during contract negotiations.

This might have been nothing more than a previously hard job becoming easier, Hallelujah. But most print companies took it further. Talking to the people who understood the technology became demeaning, something to be avoided. Information was to move from management to workers, not vice-versa (a pattern that later came to other kinds of media businesses as well.) By the time the web came around and understanding the technology mattered again, many media executives hadn’t just lost the habit of talking with their own technically adept employees, they’d actively suppressed it.

Related: List of UNIX alternatives with desirable capabilities

https://pastebin.com/BQh3e1ug

“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” —John Gilmore

“The Internet interprets the absence of censorship as wickedness or weakness and attacks it.” —me

Please note that the above two statements do not contradict each other.

Poul-Henning Kamp's article, A Generation Lost in the Bazaar, explained the absurdity of autoconf & libtool at length. I quote some of it, below.

“At the bottom of the food chain, so to speak, is libtool, which tries to hide the fact that there is no standardized way to build a shared library in Unix. …the source code for devel/libtool weighs in at 414,740 lines. Half that line count is test cases… the tests elaborately explore the functionality of the complex solution for a problem that should not exist in the first place. Even more maddening is that 31,085 of those lines are in a single unreadably ugly shell script called configure. The idea is that the configure script performs approximately 200 automated tests, so that the user is not burdened with configuring libtool manually. This is a horribly bad idea, already much criticized back in the 1980s when it appeared, as it allows source code to pretend to be portable behind the veneer of the configure script, rather than actually having the quality of portability to begin with. It is a travesty that the configure idea survived. …

“The configure scripts back then were written by hand and did things like figure out if this was most like a BSD- or a SysV-style Unix, and then copied one or the other Makefile and maybe also a .h file into place. Later the configure scripts became more ambitious, and … rather than standardize Unix to eliminate the need for them, somebody wrote a program, autoconf, to write the configure scripts.

“Today's Unix/Posix-like operating systems, even including IBM's z/OS mainframe version, as seen with 1980 eyes are identical; yet the 31,085 lines of configure for libtool still check if <sys/stat.h> and <stdlib.h> exist, even though the Unixen, which lacked them, had neither sufficient memory to execute libtool nor disks big enough for its 16-MB source code.”

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257

Thunderbird. Yes, the e-mail client.

Adding a new feed is neither user friendly, nor obvious, but it's nice to not need an extra program to read feeds.