cturner

It depends what you use it for. I worked on a interbank messaging platform that normalised everything into a series of standard xml formats, and then used xslt for representing data to the client. Common use case - we could rerender data to what a receiver’s risk system were expecting in config (not compiled code). You could have people trained in xslt doing that, they did not need to be more experienced developers. Fixes were fast. It was good for this. Another time i worked on a production pipeline for a publisher of education books. Again, data stored in normalised xml. Xslt is well suited to mangling in that scenario.

In the UK the government has somewhat gone after banks at a that level - money transfers. When someone falls for a scam and transfers money to a scammer, the government often makes the call that the bank is at fault for that. This is the absolute laziest thing the government could do, because it allocates all responsibility to the last line of defence rather than being an intelligent response to the problem.

This has led to the situation that doing a wire transfer regularly leads to intervention by the bank’s anti fraud team. This attitude has created a huge cost and risk overhead for all the banks, it forces inconvenience on consumers, and it hurts productivity of the economy.

A better way to combat fraud would be to drive improvements to the telephone network. Regulate to make the networks enforce accuracy of the phone numbers they are displaying, give the feature to reliably blacklist phone numbers, make the phone providers monitor for patterns of behaviour that look like scammer or mass marketing activity. There is no good reason that the phone companies should not have been expected to reach these standards decades ago. These fixes would assist with other law enforcement matters, such as tracing prank emergency services calls. But it requires meaningful work from policy makers, and it is not glamorous, so that never gets done.

UI concerns need to be in service to the full set of requirements and the data model.

UIs are easily accessible to end-users and product-managers, and can allow people to focus on a subset of the requirements. The trap is to allow the UI perspective to direct the development process.

It is vital to set an expectation with customers that allows discussion about UI matters as part of requirements discovery, but where they expect it to churn. During early development UI should be rough and should churn constantly in response to changes of more foundational matters: the business requirements, the data model, concurrency matters, interactions with other systems and the deployment.

I have in the region of 200 piano rolls in London. Classical emphasis, for example, lots of bach and beethoven. The piano player itself is long gone. The roll collection has been picked over, there will be no monetary high value items. If anyone wants the collection, we could coordinate, I am cratuki at the google service.

In the study, the subjects have access to both reference books and phones to allow them to look these things up. I didn't know Michaelmas Term either and looked it up while I was reading.

I am doubtful that this is about people not reading as hard and often. Alternate hypothesis: the problem is that people are not thinking as hard and often.

It might be an interesting development of the study to test the comprehension of engineering and then science students on the same passages.

There are complex reports that every European-regulated finance entity needs to submit to their regulator. They are always complicated, but they are only sometimes well-specified. The formats evolve over time.

There is a cottage industry of fintech firms that issue their clients with a generator for each of these reports. These generators will be (a) an excel template file and (b) an excel macro file.

The regulators are not technically sophisticated, but the federated technology solution allows each to own its regional turf, so this is the model rather than centralised systems.

If the regulator makes a mess of receiving one of your reports, they will probably suggest that you screwed up. But if you are using the same excel-generator as a lot of other firms, they will be getting the same feedback from other firms. If you did make a mistake, you can seek help from consulting firms who do not understand the underlying format, but know the excel templates.

There are people whose day-to-day work is updating and synchronising the sheets to internal documentation. It gets worse every year.

Sometimes the formats are defined as XBRL documents. Even then, in practice it is excel but one step removed. On the positive side - if you run a linux desktop you have decent odds to avoid these projects, due to the excel connection.

We use the word inheritance to refer to two concepts. There is implementation-inheritance. There is type-inheritance. These ideas are easily confused, which should be cause to have distinct words for them. Yet we don't. (Although Java does, effectively)

I came to hacker news to take a break from a TIS-100 session, and read this comment. It frustrates me that the TIS-100 machine does not use real bytes. I have been working on puzzles that require division, and am sore that there is no right-shift.

Some themes I think about,

1. Distinct prod and non-prod environments. I think you should have distinct Lab and Production environments. It should be practical to commit something to your codebase, and then test it in Lab. Then, you deploy that to Production. The Github actions model confuses the concepts of (source control) and (deployment environment). So you easily end up with no lab environment, and people doing development work against production.

2. Distinguish programming language expression and DSLs. Github yaml reminds me of an older time where people built programming languages in XML. It is an interesting idea, but it does not work out. The value of a programming language: the more features it has, the better. The value of a DSL: the fewer features it has, the better.

3. Security. There is a growing set of github-action libraries. The Github ecosystem makes it easy to install runners on workstations to accept dispatch from github actions. This combination opens opportunities for remote attacks.

Our generation shuddered in terror when we were asked to translate a spreadsheet to code while the spreadsheet continued to evolve.

This generation will shudder when they are asked to bring discipline to deployments built from github actions.

"If I break into a factory or laboratory of some kind and just walk out" This is a weak analogy. In the situation you describe, right-and-wrong is easily understood by the layman, there is a common legal framework, there is muscle to enforce the legal framework.

In the computing space - if someone breaks the rules, it is only a bunch of us that understand what rule was broken, and even then we are likely to argue over the details of it. The people doing the breaks are often anonymous. There is no shared legal framework, or enforcement, or courts. The consequences of a break are usually weak. Consider the lack of jail time for anyone involved with Superfish. Many of these people were located in the developed world.

The computing world often resembles the lawlessness of earlier eras - where only locally-run fortifications separated civilian farmers from barbarian horsemen. A breach in this wall leads to catastrophe. It needs to be unbreakable. People who maintain fortifications shoulder a heavy responsibility.

Agree that (pumped) hydro is good where it is practical.

You make a claim about reworking our economy,

> The power is cheap enough that it's worth reworking our entire economy around it.

Can you substantiate this? Would it be fair to describe it as a utopian claim?

We are talking about a form of power that is not free. Solar panels and installation have initial costs and refresh costs. Your 90%/20% notes are a hypothetical, and may apply to some settings, but I expect they will be niche. People want to heat their homes, and boil kettles and run webservers.

I have no problem with aesthetics like *punk. But when these aesthetics influence public policy we end up with dysfunction, like countries that have lots of electric vehicles being powered by new coal power plants. The original post said our era will be looked down on for not covering buildings with solar panels. I don’t think that is correct.

Combination of all the points you make, yes.

Solar does not generate continuous supply. If you want to propose putting solar panels on everything you need a solid strategy for storing the energy. This is an unsolved problem in our time, and there is a lot of distraction in wishful thinking - talk of kinetic capture or hydrogen conversion that does not stack up.

There may be practical issues that explain delays. Consider a team who are staffed to suit normal activity. Then there is a period of increased activity, the team fall behind.

There is a legitimate role for both things: to have some non-inflationary things that serve as a store-of-value, and then some inflationary things to serve as regular currency.

It is worth emphasising here: non-inflationary currency does not grow its value, so it would be unusual for people to want to put their wealth exclusively into store-of-value. Rather, most people will want a mix of inflationary-currency, store-of-value, and investment in growth-generating businesses.

When people talk about wanting to use bitcoin as a day-to-day currency, I feel like they are missing the best benefit if could offer us.

We already have effective day-to-day currencies. But we have not had a reliable store of value. The US, UK and Australia each have a history of denying ownership of gold when it suits them, which is when people need it most.

The lack of reliable store-of-wealth has made it too-easy for governments to fleece wealth-generating people in order to buy votes. This is not the long-term strategic path, but it creates a race-to-the-bottom due to short-term incentives. Perhaps blockchain will change that, by allowing the creation of an easily accessed utility that sits beyond the easy influence of the nation state.

To be effective it does not need to be perfect, just better than the options we have now. It has been encouraging to me to see the CCP struggling with blockchain, and then outlawing it because they cannot control it.

Gresham's law says that "bad money drives out good". Due to the dynamic this describes, it is unlikely bitcoin would commonly be used to buy and sell things even if it did not suffer practical obstacles.

Bitcoin experiences less inflation than regular currencies. Some coins get created now, but over time we know its character will become deflationary: no new coins will be created, and some will be lost at times due to poor wallet management.

As a result, people will chose to spend other currency in preference to spending bitcoin. This is self-reinforcing. The infrastructure will not be in place to use it on the odd occasion that someone wanted to.

You could create a blockchain currency which had a natural and continuous rate of inflation, to encourage people to spend it. You could bootstrap this by mutualising it across an industry. e.g. imagine if the largest datacentre groups got together to create ModestlyInflationaryCoin, and then said they would offer discounts to customers who paid in ModestlyInflationaryCoin, as a means of bootstrapping it. Other groups might start to use it, and it would stay in circulation because people would want to be rid of it once they had it.

Even if such a currency existed, it would probably be short-lived. /Once it was bootstrapped/, its stakeholders would have strong incentive to change its contract to be non-inflationary. Making that change would convert their holdings from Bad Money to Good Money, and as a result the character it would significantly increase its value.

But the datacentre groups could then mutualise a new currency in place of the old one. It is possible that there is a virtuous loop here, and that there will be a race to quality in currencies in our future, grown from how easy it is to create new currencies. We might start to see the identity of currencies a bit more like the way we see futures contracts in our current era.

I would love something like duolingo, but for an array language. Not a steady series of challenging puzzles like leetcode sites, Rather, a series of questions with high repetition, somewhat like flash cards, easy to drop into for a few minutes.

You have made the argument that monopolies are trade-offs only to the extent of muddying the waters about the matter. You have not demonstrated that the innovation benefit of monopolies offsets opportunity cost of the monopoly. If you want to make that case, you need to evidence it. You have not evidenced your claim that there is less innovation in low-monopoly situations than in high-monopoly situations. That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

(I agree with your earlier sentiment that Google has a history of giving out more than other companies you listed.)

I have worked on equities platforms in the US and Europe. I consider both arguments given early in the piece to be convincing defences of insider trading bans.

1. "insider trading argue [..] violates the principle of equal opportunity because actors are trading on information available only to them". This is true - it does undermine the principle of equal opportunity. The argument the author makes later about hedge funds is not relevant to this, because they are building their conclusions from a foundation of public information.

2. "[insider trading] creates inefficiencies by discouraging investment". It does. The equities market only exists because of the combination of the heavy regulation that creates it, and the public that chooses to invest in it. The equities market will only retain public confidence while people have high confidence in the utility value of the system. This is an ongoing project, akin to regularly painting a house to protect the walls. Allowing insider trading would undermine that project, because it would rightfully strengthen the perception that there was one standard for insiders and another for outsiders.

I will present two further arguments.

3. Work related to employment should focus on service to the company. If people are trading on the back of information they access through employment, that creates mixed incentives.

4. Laws around equities trading are structured to service the principle of do-the-right-thing. This includes bans on front-running, rules about not loading up the book to communicate false interest. The ban on insider trading fits naturally into the ethos of the larger set of rules. It would be weird to create an exception for that alone.

The post does give an interesting picture of a world without insider trading.

a. More efficient price-discovery. This is true.

b. Non-government mechanisms where firms prevent insider trading. A firm could build a reputation for being good at this, and distinguish themselves against the market.

The second point is true, but it creates a more complicated market structure, because pricing of equities would need to consider how individual companies enforce the behaviour of their staff. Perhaps this would evolve into an industry standard akin to SOC 2 Type 2. Yuck! It is simpler and more efficient to have the regulator outlaw insider trading.

Most markets emerge organically. Food stalls, shoe shops, commodities, foreign exchange. But this is not true of the equities market.

The equities market as we currently think of it is a product of heavy government regulation, and would not exist without it. There is no such thing as a big equities market without heavy regulation. If you tried to build such a thing, that thing would not win public confidence. If they changed an existing system, liquidity would flow away to other jurisdictions. The importance of public confidence motivated Hong Kong and France [1] to create insider trading bans. The dynamics of insider trading and public confidence are a reason to be dubious about the prospects of some proposals for blockchain-based securities.

:1 see p46/47 https://repository.law.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...

Had not heard of Apollo, an interesting read. I am building a 9P library at the moment towards some projects in this spirit.

You make a good case for base features in your last paragraph. I think monolith drivers as well. Raw speed seems to be important for survival in computing platforms. I am far from a domain expert but as far as I know, monolith drivers have efficiency/speed advantages over microkernel.

Be is much more like NT than OS/2 or classic Mac OS. Like NT: kernel written in C, portable, emphasis on multi-threading, robust against subsystem failures, shipped with a TCP/IP stack in the base OS. Be booted straight into the desktop but you could download software to give it a logon screen like NT4 and different users - the structures were already in place.

The current crop of operating systems may themselves be a temporary niche. The design of NT and unix are awash with single-host assumptions yet most use-cases are now networked. Consider the way that linux filesystem handles are specific to the host they are running on, rather than the grid of computers they run in. Yet we run word-processors in browsers, ssh to other host to dispatch jobs.

There is a gap for a system which has an API that feels like an operating system API, but which sits on top of a grid of computers, rather than a single host. The kernel/keeper acts as a resource-manager for CPUs and memory in the grid. Such systems exist in sophisticated companies but not in the mainstream. Apache Yarn is an example of a system headed in that direction.

Once such a system becomes mainstream, you don't need the kind of complex operating systems we have now. A viable OS would do far less - coordinate drivers, scheduler, TCP/IP stack.

Java and python have dynamic dispatch, but they don't drop messages.

Stefany is not advertising them for sale at the moment, but is still working on a 68040/48060 platform in the background. https://c256foenix.com/a2560x/?v=6cc98ba2045f

If you are looking for an audience for your platform, you may want to connect to that community via their Discord. They have some experienced network stack developers.

I found the part about clay cisterns fascinating (6:40). Does anyone know the trade-offs about lining the outside of cellar walls with a thick layer of clay. Would it be effective to pour a slab foundation onto a thick layer of clay? Or, to have a thick layer of clay, and then a few feet of gravel, and to pour a slab onto that?

Similar story for me. Elevation, your post is a form of marketing and you need to give people a way they can contact you. For a start, email address in your profile.

This is a beat-up. The US has a lease on the territory, and it is their prerogative to control access. The British would not have let Chinese lawmakers into Kowloon during the lease. The US would not let Cuban lawmakers into Guantánamo Bay, also leased.

A major difference is the clearing model. The asset classes you mention generally have a clearing house behind them. This is designed to protect the system against counterparty risk. If one party goes under, it has limited contagion, even to the people who were (in practical terms) on the other side of the trades.

This layer of protection allows better specialisation. In crypto, you need to trade on your own balance sheet. In centrally cleared markets, it is routine for trading firms to lease balance sheet from banks, who have lots of capital and good risk management at scale, but who are typically less effective at trading specific markets competitively. This leads to more liquidity being available and more competitive markets.