uasm's comments

The "Chief Purpose Officer" at Ethos is working hard these days to keep us all well informed - http://www.circleid.com/pp/dot-org-sale

> "I would recommend musl, although the style is a bit idiosyncratic in places: https://www.musl-libc.org"

Opened a random part of musl out of sheer boredom. Here's what I see:

https://git.musl-libc.org/cgit/musl/tree/include/aio.h

A bunch of return codes #defined like so (see https://git.musl-libc.org/cgit/musl/tree/src/aio/aio.c):

#define AIO_CANCELED 0 #define AIO_NOTCANCELED 1 #define AIO_ALLDONE 2

#define LIO_READ 0 #define LIO_WRITE 1 #define LIO_NOP 2

#define LIO_WAIT 0 #define LIO_NOWAIT 1

Why weren't they using an enum instead? I wouldn't sign off on this code (and I don't think it lives up to best practices).

> "Tech debt is what the 2nd generation of engineers gets to complain about after the 1st gen made the product succesful at something."

Strange and snarky comment for a "Chief Technical Officer". Software constantly evolves, it's a process of continuous refinement.

Zoom's past success may have been partially attributed to "1st gen engineers" hitting the jackpot. Zoom's fate right now rests on the ability of those "2nd generation engineers" to keep the show going.

Broader question - is there some-kind of support planned for a DNS-like MX address mechanism, for receiving emails via the .crypto domain?

It's 2020 and locking your screen on Linux is unreliable. It's difficult to promote Linux as a worthy consumer desktop OS alternative.

> "If Waymo turns trucking into an automated business (or even just reduces the number of humans needed to haul cargo), we could be in for a similar situation."

Sure.

Tuning in to last week's news - "Mass layoffs reported after Starsky Robotics fails to find buyer, investors" [0]. Starsky had a demonstrable path to "reduce the number of humans needed to haul cargo". What gives?

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22420147

Thanks.

So, a given "specification" (how a font looks to the human eye) can have many different "implementations" (ie. TTF files). The specific "implementations" themselves can be copyrighted, but somehow not the "specifications"?

If so... assume one TTF file which is copyrighted, pay-per-use license. Assume another TTF file, which is open-source, free to use and redistribute. The files both implement the "Helvetica" specification, rendering the same letters to the human eye. How "different" must the free implementation be from the paid one, for it to not be considered an infringement?

> "I created this font by purchasing a Leroy Lettering set, using Inkscape to trace the scanned letterforms of one of its templates, and some FontForge Python scripting."

How does this work from a copyright/legal perspective?

Stacks are used extensively across the x86 family [0]

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_calling_conventions

> "WASM translated to register-based bytecode. That's awesome!"

If the hardware executing this code is "stack-based" (or, does not offer enough general purpose registers to accomodate the funtion call) - this will need to be converted back to a stack-based function call (either at runtime, or beforehand). Wouldn't this intermediate WASM-to-register-based-bytecode translation be redundant then?

Friendly reminder: you don't really know whether this person truly works for the NHS, as they claim. Don't divulge sensitive information to random people.

> "I am on alexa 1m (50k even). I do not have a load balancer, I do not have multiple servers for redundancy. This isn't even a static site, most of our page views are the wiki, the server running all of this has 8 cores and 4 are constantly maxxed out by a non-website related process.

Most websites now and days are over engineered."

That's awesome! Mind sharing some more details? (hosting plan/CDN/etc). Or even the URL?

> "Using CPU jitter is a clever solution. I hope it stands up to scrutiny."

How safe is it to use CPU jitter in a virtual machine?

> "I wish the reporter could elaborate more on whether there are live websites broken due to this or is it a project under development so we can measure the impact more."

(Quoted a comment from the thread on https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=100574...)

Wasn't this specific version of Chrome rolling out to production users world-wide? Clearly there was a subset of users that was impacted by this (otherwise, a report wouldn't have been made in the first place). Not sure why they're asking the reporter about the state of their specific project?... :\

> "They whitelist domains"

That's not a bad idea, actually. Who maintains those whitelists and how do they get updated? If you want to make the web somewhat usable for others, is it enough to whitelist "google.com"/"youtube.com" only (for example)?

I'm not for or against Erlang. While honestly attempting to learn something new today, I became frustrated with how devoid of content most of the comments in this thread are. "I'm {senior title}, and {tech name} is great" is as far as most of the comments go. That's just extremely mediocre.

> "Dark definitely won't be for everyone, but it seems to me like it will empower a lot of people to bring their ideas to reality more easily than before."

I agree.

> "There is a large - and growing - population of technically-minded people who understand the core concepts you're referring to (REST APIs, databases, HTTP, etc) and have ideas or needs for applications, but don't have the experience required to build non-naive implementations of their ideas."

Sure, but one could argue the Darklang approach is actually not that far from a "naive implementation" of those ideas. There's only so much you can do with prefab code and lock-in tooling. There's definitely a market for "Wix for SaaS software", but does Darklang strike the right balance?

Who is this for exactly?

I don't see how the target can be entirely non-technical people, since this still assumes some knowledge around databases/functions/REST/HTTP/Schemas/etc.

Technical people have very little reason to use this, since this platform is a walled garden of proprietary tooling, and there's only so much you can achieve with abstractions and fancy ORM. You won't be able to break out of the mould when the time comes, so why waste your time in the first place? Do it right the first time and maintain your flexibility and freedom later on.

I believe the only remaining target audience here is technically-inclined people that want to build a cheap prototype quickly, just to test ideas. This is a playground basically.

> "On this kind of topic, those who know won't say if it's on the record. You're lucky for them to say when it's not on the record."

Honest question:

Would WikiLeaks "work" if all we had was anonymous "former officials" making broad/general statements, providing no proof whatsoever?

What about Snowden's leaks? Imagine a really long article on Politico listing every single thing exposed in the Snowden docs, but without the names/documents/specifics. In a style very similar to what we have here in this Politico piece. Without us even knowing it was leaked by Snowden, but by some random "former NSA official".

Look, I'm not saying this Politico piece is right or wrong. All I'm saying is - this piece is making very big statements, backed by absolutely no proof whatsoever. And yet people are taking out the pitchforks... this isn't journalism, it's just spreading unsubstantiated FUD. And we should be discouraging this, not defending it.

No proof, no citations, no names. A lot of third person language. Anonymous "former officials". Great journalism right there!