aparsons

I think a lot of people - dare I say it, even PaulG - are missing the point of Mighty (or not putting it into words properly).

Mighty isn’t betting on the internet continually getting more bloated, or being better than a thick client. Even for a poor person working mostly in Figma, buying a decent laptop will be much more cost-effective.

What they are really selling is the equivalent of upgrading your laptop to a new model while it’s still running. Hardware shopping is time-consuming, stressful, and never done proactively - so you suffer in silence till the new one arrives. Then you have to replicate your old workflow and warm the caches.

The two biggest threats to Mighty are Apple/MSFT building “snapshot” recoveries in new hardware (almost AMI-like), and real adoption of saving bookmarks, history and passwords to the cloud by signing in to Chrome (most I know are hesitant). As has always been the case in this industry, the hardware is irrelevant.

This isn’t game-streaming, where you unlock hardware economies of scale because most users play a tiny amount a day on average. Your browser is always on.

Excellent! One of my favorite HN moments :)

Did they ever mention who they are or what company? Very curious as I also enjoy reading their posts on occasion

Thanks for the overview. I’m looking forward to it, and best of luck with your project!

I find tech like this so impressive, because back when I used to code for a living, web browsers were slow, clunky and woefully underpowered.

Is the core app just using a canvas/svg? Did you have to build your own UI toolkit on top of it? Any open source libraries / similar projects I can read to learn more?

Thanks

I think it’s misdirected anger. The reason we enjoy the strong, stable economy that allowed Google and Microsoft is flourish is our strong military that prefers to play “away games”.

I often half-joke that the aircraft carrier did more for democracy than a Gandhi and Mandela combined.

I read it more as a plea that “we’re desperate”

What do you mean by game-style here? I’m very intrigued. Any place to read more about these?

Linus is a brilliant guy. Underneath his quirky, cold persona, and the short temper, is a guy I admire not just for his technical brilliance, but his ability to put it into words so concisely and correctly. That’s the one superpower people don’t realize makes great engineers (now remember that English isn’t Linus’ first language).

I’ve felt this with Linus, Dave Cutler and other “10x” engineers. Their code really isn’t that much better than anyone else with similar level of experience. Lot of engineers come up with neat solutions. But listening to these men or reading something they’ve written on their topic of interest, it feels as if you’d figured out the thing they’d just explained by yourself.

I think Karl is one of the players that history looks back on more kindly than the present did. He was seen as not a winner/unable to win at the time, and a lot of fans valued that more so than at present. If you asked 10 people to choose between Malone and Pippen, it would have been 5 and 5.

I’ve seen a lot of efforts to add a notion of associative memory into neural networks. Have any exciting applications of such architectures been publicised?

A VSCode extension (triggered on README.* files) that does this would be very nice to have

He was a good numbers guy, but there were always five or more players better than him throughout his tenure. Certainly not 2 MVP's good.

I have not watched NBA basketball in years, but the NBA had the most vague definition of MVP going back decades.

What it certainly is not - since the 1980s or longer - is “best player”. Magic over Jordan in the late 90s set that precedent, followed by Karl Malone winning a few as a good but not great player.

This continued in the 2000s, with Shaquille O’Neal not winning as many as one might predict. I suspect that is still the case.

I turn my old Macbooks into pseudo desktops as the batteries start to go. My 2012 MBP is my girlfriend’s “desktop” now.

Cue arms race

Link is broken

I chuckled! I spoke to Anthony at the Udacity office in Mountain View around 2018 (he’d already left Uber to found his trucking company). He seemed like he’d given up on city streets being autonomously drivable any time soon, but highways were still on the table in the next five years. One idea he floated was to employ drivers only from the exit ramp for the last mile journey. For trucking, this made sense.

This is a near product, and a reminder than first-mover advantage is huge. It’s not trivially cloneable, but the barriers to entry are very small. As a first mover, PhotoPea’s advantage is mindshare, nor data or infrastructure.

Neuralink /s

If you’d like to read a canonical, well-commented implementation, here is one from OpenJDK: http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk9/jdk9/jdk/file/37a05a11f281/s...

They should have done this a long time ago. Sharing photos in a non-attachment format with close friends is a feature I wish iMessage had. I hope they borrow a little from Google+ circles. Android support will also be very welcome. Apple isn’t the greatest at usable software interfaces, but I quite enjoy the thought they put into the interactions.

The “arbitrary” part is a force of how rather than what programs are run. Is your Smalltalk code running by compiling it into the OS? Is it loaded as a library? Can I write a C backend to output an indistinguishable library? In the latter cases, it is still capable of running arbitrary code - you may just be choosing not to.

You may have found a loophole in my specification :) I’d like to amend it to specify that an OS refers to software “that can run...”. (And this is why we do design reviews!).

In your example, a real or virtual machine’s load/setregs interface is an operating system. One that can only run a single program at a time in the case of the physical processor’s bootstrap, but you’d be surprised how similar that is to early DOS.

A more hand-waving version is “the lowest level interface over the machine that can run...”. So a processor and a ROM grid can run arbitrary programs, but the lowest common denominator entry point is the ROM flashing spec! A very slow scheduler indeed.

Thanks for your input. I don’t know the insider story like you do, but went off descriptions of the review process from good friends who worked at Amazon.

I like to define an OS as something that can execute arbitrary binaries. So if your hypothetical Smalltalk OS has a defined executable format that non-Smalltalk programs can compile to, I’d call it an OS.

Note that this also makes for example the uppermost part of the JVM an OS by my definition. I’d argue it’s not a completely incorrect characterization.

Per Vognsen’s Bitwise (*) was one of my favorites until it was discontinued. It’s not a complete set, but still a great watch. I also enjoyed George Hotz’s occasional programming streams. He reminds me of some of my favorite colleagues from over the years.

I haven’t watched chess in a while, but your comment certainly sparked something. I may give it another go.

For a less nerd-y class of content, I have also enjoyed boxing videos - especially those focused on coaches illustrating technique.

[*] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCguWV1bZg1QiWbY32vGnOLw

In my retirement, watching programming streams has been a guilty pleasure (drives my SO crazy), and this is one of my favorite channels. I especially loved their other video on making Minecraft from scratch*

* - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4O0_-1NaWnY

Because Google turned the computers into a commodity. These employees swap out broken machines for the most part, but the software stack is so redundant that you can pull out a machine running a key job and the scheduler will simply retry it somewhere else. Similarly for files with GFS. All machines have their own battery so the possibility of the whole thing going down is slim. It’s beautiful how they’ve evolved from running on Sun mainframes in the early part of the century. The workers at the datacenters basically do mindless labour, so aren’t paid like a typical sysadmin.

I don’t think Amazon stack ranks per se. at least for engineers, I found their perf process well-thought-out. For example, “meets expectations” is usually good enough for a promotion or pay raise, unlike the practice at similar companies where the expectation is to exceed expectations.