verisimilitudes

Almost all software is broken, in fact. A real field of engineering would prohibit most of the stupid shit idiots claiming to be programmers do before even reaching for the other issues.

Lisp and Smalltalk existed before the C language, and don't have its damning flaws. Ada's also much nicer. As for the operating system, there are currently no good such systems that aren't very old. I use Emacs to largely avoid the UNIX sh. Ideally, a university would have its own operating system, but I suppose that would be too hard, in comparison to accreting another layer of shit over UNIX. Something such as Alan Kay's VPRI would be best: http://vpri.org

I didn't go to a university to learn anything about computers, fortunately.

UNIX sucks. Of course, enough time has passed that people expect a mathematics degree to come with diarrhea from the 1970s for stupid reasons.

I was waiting for my comment to be flagged. Here it is again:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33124973

> Give a single example of how the Encyclopedia Britannica be worse than random idiots, foreign agents, and shills on Wikipedia.

I received no answer, which is what I expected. It was easier to flag the comment, because this forum is pathetic.

> Wikipedia is often okay for science articles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman (4th paragraph)

> Don't you Google answers to questions?

No. I don't use it at all.

> It's what they will be doing most of their life.

Everyday I hate this website and the people on it more.

They could learn about SNES emulator Near (RIP) or, say, the Scots language.

Yeah, because they don't allow account deletion.

I own no phone. Google phones can't consistently dial emergency numbers, because they're programmed by incompetent fuckwads.

I agree that Hacker News should die.

Individuals do, clearly. I don't use Google-funded malware. I suppose the Linux kernel may qualify, but plenty of people in real industries also work on that.

I'm not a parasite, so telling people about something I did by myself is fine, and I'm not asking for money anyway.

I've complained about it once. I've been prickly, sure. Telling the truth to liars tends to come off as prickly. I'd delete this account if I could.

>Surely you're not going to make your case on this petty a detail.

It's called pilpul and he obviously will.

I'm so glad this article made the front page, whereas my latest article upload that was actually about programming on Hacker News was shadowbanned so it wouldn't receive any votes.

The argument is clear. Bitcoin is bad because most of Hacker News missed the boat and because the environment is an easy excuse. Meanwhile, inefficient webshit such as Slack running on millions of computers or sending megabytes of traffic over the Internet for basic shit is fine, because those produce acceptable money. Also, it's much harder to estimate the energy waste from constantly surveilling people to send Turing-complete advertisements to their phones but, again, those make USD, so they're okay.

Hey, fellow genius on Hacker News, do note that TLS doesn't protect against state actors, because they can very easily manipulate certificate authorities, and a malicious certificate authority completely removes most protections TLS supposedly provides.

I'd rather implement IMAP than HTTP, TLS, JSON, and whatever other shit is involved here. All of those points apply to the WWW more than anything else.

S-expressions are better, and something that sees so much usage should have a dedicated format. In a saner world, this work would already be done so that each protocol needn't define the octets on the line. Regardless, IMAP already exists.

It's a diseased mind that takes a shitty programming language, JavaScript, and turns it into a shitty structured data format.

That's not the way this works. I needn't accept the WWW garbage graphomaniacs attempt to force upon others.

Yeah, what can't be fixed by shoveling JSON shit into HTTP instead of a dedicated protocol?

JMAP was stupid when the Fastmail CEO or whoever was here pushing it, and it's still stupid.

That's called a personal problem. It's not the responsibilty of a website owner to make his website constantly rot for the sake of strangers.

I suppose all of my fellow machine code programmers here are too busy discussing politics or something. I look forward to participating yet again, using my custom machine code development tool to write very compact and very efficient little games. I've so many ideas for games built up over the years, but must settle with the reality that implementing all of them in one month is unrealistic. Regardless, I aim to get two or even three finished, and as always will document my work in detail on my website.

>You still cannot disable pull requests on a GitHub repository.

>I just want to publish software that I think is neat so that other hobbyists can use and learn from it, and I otherwise want to be left the hell alone.

Don't use GitHub. I don't. Random dipshits aren't even aware of me.

>To continue the inclusive nature of open source, we need to be able to trust a wide range of identities, but still with verified integrity. This implies a federated model for identities, perhaps similar to how we support federated SSL certificates today

Oh yes, of course Google supports TLS-flavoured snake oil to match the TLS snake oil.

I'm shocked MicroSoft is extending open source after embracing it so well, shocked.

I'm now recycling a previous comment of mine on this topic:

Companies used to have employees write code, rather than stitch together random garbage written by random dipshits who could be tricked into using loose licenses. That's one cause for concern. The only reason open source receives support is because it helps corporations defang Free Software and get gratis labor.

All of this new security theatre is always about trust and reputation, and not trusting those disgusting lone programmers such as me or other silly things; it's always really about doing anything but truly auditing that yucky code.

Let's use the linux kernel as an example, since it does very few, well-defined things, and still doesn't work. This comes from an inability to imagine better, an unwillingness to use proper tools, and an attitude that kernel panics be acceptable.

It's fine to solve a vague problem by simply having the machine ask for human direction in a few cases. It's not fine to have the machine do something inappropriate or crash because a valid case wasn't handled in any way.

Everything below these vague areas can, and should, be perfect. People who claim this be an unobtainable goal are liars.

I'm not entirely disagreeing, but this is a disgusting mindset when applied to mathematics, and programming is applied mathematics. I've seen it so often. The incompetent spend so much of their time dredging up excuses for mediocrity, rather than improving.

I've noticed a difference in tone:

> The site is openly racist and antisemitic and it regularly advocates a second genocide of Jews.

> „Right now, Nick Lim is like a wounded elk”, says internet researcher Guilmette, who monitors the websites’ every move. „It is time to move in quickly for the kill, before he gets away again.”

If I didn't know better, I'd assume these people don't want others to be able to advocate for certain ideas. It's funny how that works. One side gets to use the freedom of speech excuse when, say, targeting children, but merely disagreeing with that magically becomes hate speech, which totally isn't free speech, and must be mercilessly destroyed.

Oh well, people can go into the streets if they want to speak and, hey, once it really comes to that point there will be more than strong words now won't there be?

Hacker News is part of the elite, so that will never happen. Just look at how VC and YC companies Uber and AirBnB have eroded workers' rights and zoning laws for elite profit. That's the secret with all of these companies; they claim that using computers means they needn't follow the laws. Look at how YouTube shows children things no television network ever would've been allowed to show them, for another example.

> If a carpenter chops his fingers off, it's not the fault of the saw.

That would be an effective argument, but this vile shit has existed for decades without being fixed, for no good reason. This saw is specifically designed to slice fingers off, rather than do useful work, for no reason.

> Having a base level expectation of competence for operators is normal.

UNIX expects perfection, while providing none of its own.

> A separate text input is just stdin by another name.

No, nitwit, it prevents in-band signalling, which is the entire problem here.

Anyway, I use Emacs for everything, and don't have these issues. With wget, I use -i - to enter multiple URLs at once, but it would also defeat this.

To the article:

It's fine to handle an explicit subset of a problem. What's not fine is not making this clear. Real software can generally have a well-defined domain and range, which this article muddies with its example.

> This works but is quitter talk.

It's a valid solution. Expressing weird recipes as lists of normal recipes is perfectly fine.

> If we want to include recipe expansion as a feature of our model, we need to make the algorithm more complicated to handle the single edge case of fondant.

Yes, it turns out writing correct software sometimes requires this, even for a small amount of overall cases. That's no argument against not handling all cases.

To the parent poster:

I expect someone incapable of writing perfect software to claim it to be impossible, yes. I'd upload an article I've written proving my point, but it's about correct software, so it would just get ignored here.

Software is mathematics, and mathematics can be perfect.

> This is why I laugh at talk of "bug free" software. The best you can do is zero reported bugs. Temporarily.

No, this is the best the incompetent can do, but I won't let them drag me down to their level.