npx's comments

The musl community is one of my favorite things on the internet. It's obvious that many members of it could be making a generous salary at any number of companies but they're just hanging out on IRC because they don't give a shit and they love software.

I don't get the sense that they think they are infallible, just that they are right far more often than not. You can't achieve the sort of spartan aesthetic that you see in the musl codebase by handling things like everyone else. The ability to distill things to their essence betrays a very high level of understanding.

As they say in the streets, the dope sells itself.

To get off into the weeds a bit... I've actually spent quite a bit of time using Illumos. The epicenter of The Suck begins, in my mind, with the effort involved in actually building the system.

GCC (and Clang) obviously didn't exist back in the day, so none of the Makefiles for the base system are written for a compiler that was released in the past 20 years. There is actually a wrapper that takes SunCC arguments and calls GCC... so that kinda works, right?

Okay, well, yes. It works. But then, it all kinda starts snowballing. There is a big investment in a debugger from the 1980s which can't unwind stacks without frame pointers. So... we have to emit frame pointers. Okay, that works. Because we care a lot about this, we'll also ensure that all function arguments promoted to registers are also copied to the stack so we can always look at them. Okay, fair enough.

Is this idiosyncratic enough for you yet? Okay, let's step it up a few notches and actually implement the Linux system call table on top of this. Wait, what? The struggle is real.

This is all technically brilliant in any number of ways, but I have things to do this week. All of the man years of effort spent on Linux and the surrounding ecosystem have actually solved a lot of real technical problems and solved them incredibly well.

Competition from Linux has become very stiff. For me, Kubuntu 19.10 delivers on all of the promises that OpenSolaris made back in the day. My laptop has two 1TB SSDs in a ZFS mirror. Docker works as you'd hope, creating a new ZFS dataset for each container. I have remarkably good hardware support, everything just works. I'd say that the user experience rivals or beats MacOS or Windows, although at this point I'd say it is largely just a matter of preference.

Linux still lacks the multitenant security guarantees of Solaris Zones but this isn't so bad. Hard multitenancy is a problem that only concerns a fairly small subset of people and even then, there are solutions. You can do hard multitenancy with Linux containers (namespaces/cgroups to be pedantic) if you start restricting the system call table. There is also Firecracker[1] which obviously isn't as efficient as Zones (because it uses VMs), but is proven in production and does provide additional security guarantees.

The technical advantages of Illumos are outweighed (or rivaled) at this point, in my opinion. When I show people things on my laptop, I always end up talking about the desktop cube in KDE or my neovim/tmux/zsh setup. Due to ZFS snapshots and the power of zfs send/recv, I expect this system installation to last for years to come. No more reinstalls, we're good, this operating system thing is covered.

1: https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker-container...

In my defense, I wasn't trying to do any of those things. I don't want personally want to be involved, I don't want the military of my country to be involved, and to the point of this story: I don't even really want my internet connection to be involved. In the final analysis, I would prefer to be on another planet entirely.

I wanted to use the NVidia GPU in this laptop, it just doesn't work as well as the Intel GPU (I hate screen tearing). I think this will be great as a development environment once I get around to making Docker work with the NVidia drivers (allegedly it should). I'm not sure if you can do the same thing with AMD gear but the ability to create a Tensorflow NN and distribute it as a hardware accelerated Docker image is pretty cool.

I love this concept and I love that it is proliferating. Purism offers what I'd consider to be more attractive hardware, but that's very subjective. As of Kubuntu 19.10, I actually consider Linux to be the best operating system for a laptop.I look forward for 20.04 and a few years of near total disregard for updates.

I want to be an AMD fanboy! I want (at least) 16 cores, 32 threads, a fully open source graphics stack, Wayland, flicker free boot, and open source firmware as described here. As it is, I just had to go with Intel/NVidia because it's more seamless. Even though I'm not really using the NVidia GPU, I do have it available if I want to work with Tensorflow etc. Ultimately, for me it is a question of stability but I hope that these systems can really close the gap.

I want something like this System76 machine with very good support for encrypted ZFS right out of the box. I don't know if that would entail LUKS or ZFS encryption, but I want it to work. I want a USB key that actually serves as a key and allows me to boot or otherwise unlock the system. Again, I'd prefer this to be a fully open source AMD/ATI system based on Kubuntu. With ZFS, bpftrace, and Docker... this is what Solaris wanted to be when it grew up.

I'm not sure how big the market for this would be, but I'd pay good American money if anyone catered to it. Right now I'm using a Dell G3 Intel/Nvidia laptop which, in fairness, is obscenely fast.

I'm a happy Protonmail user and I think this (even if it were true) is only an issue if you are being unrealistic. All companies can be legally compelled to take action regardless of their jurisdiction. If you have some gratuitously paranoid threat model, you should be using Tor anyway.

I like their service much more than GMail and I feel much more comfortable with regard to data privacy when using it.

The worst part of it, in my experience, is that it can be hard to tell a food founder from a bad founder until you've spent some time working with them. I think that venture capitalists have the same issue although they generally have a much larger database of wins and losses to shape their opinions.

Based solely on the title, I assumed this article was going to be about Jeff Bezos. We're entering a brave new world where all compute is rented from Bezos and can only be used for the furtherance of his agenda. The recent tabloid scandal kinda speaks to the underlying problem. When given documentary evidence of a tryst between Bezos and a married woman, these people did the right thing and tried to blackmail him. Bezos somehow managed to turn this into a story about his endless accomplishments and his courage in the face of adversity! Bezos isn't even competing against other companies anymore because that would be too easy. Bezos is actually competing against the rest of humanity now. We're entering the era of Bezos Purpose computing.

I went to elementary school with the founder of RapidSOS and it's pretty cool to see one of us country boys making the front page of HN! If I'm being objective about this, I think it's a fairly good idea in the abstract but it will be very difficult to monetize. Where I grew up, there are still huge gaps in cellular coverage and this won't help people who can't even make a call. I do think there is a there there but it's fraught with peril. That said, best of luck to Michael! At the very least, his heart is in the right place.

Two words: Shia Labeouf

I realize it's somewhat off topic, but I feel like Joyent Manta deserves an honorable mention. It's an S3 style object store, but you can spin up containers on top of objects and do massively parallel computations with Unix tools.

https://apidocs.joyent.com/manta/

Is it possible to start an S corporation instead? Part of the appeal of Delaware is that transitioning from S->C is a well defined process, and a C corp seems a bit silly for many businesses.

Speaking only for myself, I'm not surprised at all about this. I use Lyft exclusively, the app is much better than Uber and I've had much better experiences with the drivers (possibly just by chance).

I'm eagerly awaiting the day when we have fully autonomous self-driving electric cars and fares fall through the floor. It seems that this should be much cheaper than the current system of drivers and gasoline powered cars, although time will tell if the savings are passed on to customers.

It's very exciting to me. I don't like to drive.

If Mike Pall happens to read this, I feel like he's really selling the world short by not writing a book about dynamic language implementation. It could influence generations of programmers! Right now you have to piece together some of his mailing list posts and try to fill in the blanks, but a more thorough explanation from him would be invaluable.

I've been waiting on this for years! Not specifically THIS, but hardware along these lines. I'd like to see at least 4GB of RAM, and then I think that I could use this with Alpine Linux as my daily driver. Not quite perfect yet, but very close to what I want!

Tremendous work as always from Rich Felker, Rob Landley, & co.

Yeah, that was my first thought after a cursory reading, y u no <stdint.h>? There seems to be a lot of great content regardless.

I'd love to see an updated version.

I'm not convinced that the goal here is actually to obstruct intelligence agencies, I think they'd just use a shell company or flatly demand access if they wanted it. As far as I'm aware, the Library of Congress is archiving all tweets.

It feels like a cheap way to generate press portraying Twitter as a staunch defender of liberty. I'm not sold.

Frankly, I don't think our government really has any idea how to deal with what is actually happening right now.