strlen's comments

Any good guide on getting started with hosted AROS on Linux (Arm64 or x86_64)? I've been able to get to so far was building, being able to run but just getting an unresponsive process that did nothing (didn't debug further, but there was no high CPU utilization), but I could have missed a crucial step or have used a bad revision of the codebase.

“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and write(2)/WriteFile a struct to disk.”

Question, how does this compare/contrast to “image based persistence” as used by e.g., most Smalltalk and certain Lisp based VMs?

Yes. Scala and Clojure are my preferred JVM languages, but there are certain frameworks that are highly useful but problematic when used with Scala and/or Clojure.

* Spring Boot for web services and application. Absolutely amazing and easy to use, my favorite feature is easy integration with external authentication services. Yet there is no longer much Scala support around for Scala and the Spring framework. Clojure may be a bit better in this case as Clojure collections implement the Java collections interfaces unlike Scala. Another issue is heavy use of reflection by frameworks like Spring which tends to work poorly with Scala.

* Android applications. Dalvik is a register based and not a stack based VM; scalac produces code optimized for OpenJDK which may run inefficiently on Dalvik.

That said in these cases you have the option of using Kotlin. While it does not differ terribly from Java, it supports pattern matching (which I don’t believe is supported by Java, but I may wrong as I haven’t used versions higher than 8 extensively.)

> He looks at the code and criticizes design decisions, some of which were made largely on my manager's explicit suggestions. (When I bring this up, he says I probably just misinterpreted an offhand comment of hers as a hard requirement.)

This is very hard to do and feels very unfair, but try to own this rather than say "but this is what I was told to do." If the person is a manager she isn't writing code day to day; she is likely experienced and can offer helpful suggestions, but she can be wrong or vague, or you may simply not be familiar with the way she uses certain terms. Try to discuss these suggestions with technical leaders or the more senior engineers on the team, they will likely have more context.

Make sure you're actively listening to what people are really saying in meetings. Volunteer to take notes if it helps and then review them with the participants at the end to make sure you got their key points.

When I worked at Amazon, I was really impressed by how seriously folks took the "Leadership Principles." Two particularly struck out: "disagree and commit" and "have a backbone." Obviously the two conflict with each other at first view, but on a second look the theme is the same: know when and how to listen to others and accept their suggestions, but also know when and how to convince others to accept yours.

See also Microsoft‘s sqpal https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2016/12/16/sql-se....

Note however that DBOS inverts what sqlpal is doing.

Thank you for the revised link! Good that you mention Leto (which was a beautiful movie, despite many historical inaccuracies): Leto is set in the early, pre-perestroika 80s. The first link I posted - Elektrichka - is also from that era: it is about a man who on an electric commuter train (think Caltrain, but electrified: People’s Democratic Republic of California is behind USSR in that respected) that is taking him to a wrong destination. It is a metaphor for the state: as a result, the song was banned.

Contrast the song with Перемен (Changes): the unofficial anthem of my birth country‘s democracy movement. While the song is explicitly non-political (it is about making internal changes), it is able to convey the sentiment in USSR in the late 80s and early 90s (the song was written in 1985. prior to Perestroika.) To put another way, a song about the “gentle Nietzschean”/Schopenhauerian thesis of artists changing the world through their work, highlights the elective affinities between the agents of cultural change and the agents of political change.

An important thing to note: Kino’s front man, Victor Tsoi is of Korean descent. h Soviet Koreans, aka Koryo-Saram (there is roughly 1mm of them today in former USSR) came to Russian Empire during the Koryo dynasty (mostly from mid 19th to early 20th century.) They played an important role in the early days of USSR, but we’re deported to Central Asia as Stalin as he suspected them of harboring pro-Japanese sympathies (this would be equivalent to suspecting Jews of harboring pro-Nazi sympathies, which he also did in the case of my paternal grandfather the minister of transportation for Soviet Belarus.) Over 10% of their population died during the deportation.

Their plight was largely unknown until glasnost. The Kazakh film maker Rashid Nugmanov of Игла (Needle) fame - movie about drug addiction, a topic rarely discussed for most of USSR’s existence - which starred Tsoi and featured his music - portrayed their story in his critically acclaimed historical fiction film Месть (Revenge.)

In a tangential note relevant to HN’s usually discussed topics, Russia’s richest woman - she created e-commerce site wildberries while on maternity leave - is also of Korean descent: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatyana_Bakalchuk

“Alan Delon doesn’t drink cologne” (as you probably know) is not random: drinking cologne was very much a thing, due to alcohol rationing meant to combat drinking (which also lead to people drinking methanol and going blind or even worse.) There are also references to other aspects of Soviet household life.

Ideally Pham would be played by Chow Yun Fat, Sammy Park by Teo Yoo, Tomas Nau by Kevin Spacey, and Anne Reynolt by Lana Del Ray.

Rotoscope could be used for Spiders.

I am one of those folks (born in early 1980s in Minsk). One can get a taste of that era by listening to the amazing music from bands like Kino and Nautilus Pompilus.

Some example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWEfVZN64jU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syTqQ-TU_c8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aew6MJLyVL4

I've built a quick demo showing how to build a very basic synthesizer in rust. Missing are UI buttons controlling the sounds being emitted, I will add them at a later point.

On a slightly related tangent: I recently purchased an electric bike and have been very happy with it. It has the looks and performance of a 1920-30s Harley or Indian motorcycle (one revs the handle bars to accelerate like on a motorcycle, but the transmission is a clutch-less manual just like a road bike).

The range with standard battery is ~40 miles (but if battery is drained, one still has pedals.) Top speed (with electric motor alone) on level ground is in excess of 35 mph. With a basket and/or saddle bags it is a reasonable grocery getter.

My online complaint with this specific bike (not applicable to other models) is too few gears, not foldable, and lack of shock absorbers on the forks (can be worked around by deflating the large motorcycle like tires.)

Note that I am sure it is also legally limited in speed and acceleration as it does not require a motorcycle license. An electric bike legally registered as a motorcycle and capable of reaching 100 kph on level surface (yet with ability to pedal for exercise or to extend range - again classical motos often had that) is an item I would like to some day own or build.

Lithium Ion batteries are truly a revolutionary invention.

interesting: it did appear pretty popular behind the iron curtain (as did e.g., PL/I, home-PC sized PDP11s, and other seemingly well designed but less commercially successful western technologies.)

My parents have worked extensively on a Soviet bug for bug clone of this (with an incomplete sed job of replacing references to ATT UNIX) running on an an EVM/ES 370 (a laboriously built bug for bug clone of the IBM 370.) The whole setup would even play “Yankee Doodle Dandy” when it crashed.

This was my parents first exposure to UNIX: they have used indigenous machines (Minsk series, an early RISC-ish design), as well as PDPs but the PDPs they used did not run any UNIX variant (likely due to lack of MMU or sufficient core.)

Dear lazyweb, has anyone been able to get this going on the Herculus emulator? I am giving my father (if you read this site and know him, please dont disclose) a surface tablet for New Years (per russian custom of giving gifts on secular holidays), would be neat to install this inside Hercules (or other emulator), if needed under WSL2 (which runs on even the cheapest surface.)

Indeed they are! The notion that each process has its separate address space is called virtual memory for that reason.

See also cgroups: while this feature is used by the container run times, it predates Docker, and can be used standalone with normal processes.

Don’t ride a bike: first motor and response times are impacted, second (at least in California) you absolutely can get a DUI on a bicycle.

I believe the aforementioned engineers are simply experiencing the effects of marijuana: both acute intoxication and symptoms associated with regular use. If they're healthy adults in mid 20s, then these symptoms should go away within 1-2 weeks of discontinuing use - problem is they don't view their symptoms as associated with routine use.

That said, seeking to be routinely intoxicated could itself a symptom of something else wrong in their work or personal life. This would be a non-controversial statement to make about "hard drugs", alcohol, video games, risky relationships, etc...

> contaminant microbe would have to truly thrive in an extremely inhospitable Martian environment, survive spaceflight and decontamination, yet also be undetectable in the places on Earth where the spacecraft was constructed

To be fair, if those possibilities are true, they would also be revolutionary and should be considered (e.g., do they imply a mechanism that makes panspemria feasible?).

Likewise for an previously unknown mechanism of methane production - this itself would help us understand the origin of life. (This is one explanation, "geological" one, mentioned in the article.)

"Single celled microorganisms found to exist in conditions on Mars that mirror some of the conditions in which single celled microogranisms exist on Earth", however, seems to be a more boring one - if turns out not to be true, understanding why that happens to be the case, is also valuable.

This is really interesting as HotSpot (OpenJDK, Oracle Java) has its origin in a Smalltalk VM (Strong Talk), while Eclipse started its life as a Smalltalk IDE. Glad to see this come full circle.

There seems to be a misconception that enterprises (specifically ones where software is not considered a product) means Java and .NET with frameworks. Reality is that is this just the tip of an iceberg: a bank, a hotel chain, etc... might use Java or .NET for web applications yet great deal runs on proprietary software. Much of that software either runs on machines that are still sold and marketed as mainframes or if on commodity hardware (which nowadays offers plenty of vertical scalability in terms of memory and total number of CPU cores) coming from a mainframe lineage.

It seems as if there were two distinct cultures of engineers. Those working on workstation-grade hardware networked over TCP/IP (whether running proprietary UNIX, open source UNIX, or Windows NT) -- and Java emerged out of this.

The second cultures were developers building mainframe applications; usually they would be ones working on problems related data processing, planning, and automation for businesses (not just enterprises but also many SMBs, government organizations, hospitals, etc...)

Java clearly emerged from the first culture being built by a vendor of networked UNIX workstations. Some of Java's most memorable failures - either exceedingly complex and brittle systems like RMI, JMS, and J2EE (I mean this literally: not modern Java EE like Jersey/CDI/etc... but EJB 2.0) or features that were in retrospect far ahead of its time (JINI or JXTA, compare with consul/etcd/zookeeper and the idea of a service mesh today) came as an attempt to commoditise approaches commonly used by the first group as frameworks for solving the domain specific problems of the second.