dexen

The historical mainframes usually were rented from IBM and the likes. Less sunk investment, less reasons to stick with it.

>we are arguing about this via web browser

Which works equally well for remote AND local resources. Electron is popular for a reason.

All the centralized services - online Docs, Dropbox, Github etc., - are more subject to disruption and replacement than they would want you to believe.

SaaS has been a success in the same way "bring your own device" was a success - an end-run around the ossified, slow-moving and bureaucratic ICT department. It was nimble, fast and elastic; allowed for quick iteration and experimentation. Now that the SaaS is a big game, it's subject to the very same kind of disruption.

Take a look around, you'll see people using local Git repositories, and locally hosted web-based services to get shit done. Just to avoid the hassle of procurement & upkeep of big-name SaaS. Containers let you move the data & code to unmanaged iron where it's close to the user, instead of one big managed datacenter. SaaS and datacenter computing is not nimble anymore; local is nimble, and Google Stadia delivered the eulogy.

They can't tell satire from news.

They keep[1] fact-checking[2] satire[3], published a self-congratulatory excuse[4], and occasionally dip their toes in fact-checking memes[5].

Good laugh, not much trust in their integrity over making a quick buck.

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[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/03/us/snopes-babylon-bee.htm...

[2] https://reason.com/podcast/christian-satire-site-the-babylon...

[3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-fact-checker-declares-war-on-...

[4] https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/08/16/readers-think-satire-...

[5] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/your-city-on-socialism/

Not in the least.

"Cloud" is merely the modern spin on "terminal in the office, mainframe at the HQ". We moved from terminals to local mini/microcomputers back then, and we will move from "cloud" to edge computing again. Notably, serverless and "installable web apps" are already a growing thing.

And no, Sun, the network is the computer will not come to pass during this cycle.

It looks like a regular mechanical watch at 40mm, with two complications: a step counter, and an AMOLED screen for notifications and other readouts. Supports the usual functionalities: pulse meter, step meter & other sports tracking, visual & tactile notifications and Bluetooth synchronization with smartphone.

About the only think I would add to it is time synchronization from atomic sourced radio signals, to make it truly independent from a cellphone for extended periods of time. Mine tends to drift about a minute ahead after about a month without phone synchronization.

It's both effects really. Celestial bodies' orbits do undergo decay and also their rotation undergoes decay. The question is which happened to which degree, and I think the rotational slow down is the dominant effect in Earth's case.

Orbits decay due to various forms of drag. The long-term rate of decay of orbits in the Solar system is relatively well established.

Rotation also is slowed down due to drag, but in our case there's another major force: the tidal influence from the Moon. Earth's Moon is a relatively large companion (at 1.23%[1] by mass). Both bodies influence each other tidally, and that influence saps away rotational energy and also Moon's orbital energy; the Moon already got tidally locked to Earth. Aside of that there's a (smaller) tidal influence from the Sun, which again saps Earth's rotational energy.

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[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=mass+of+the+moon+%2F+m...

(I'm not a healthcare professional nor actuarian; the following is freehand speculation)

There are two key factors. Firstly, USA is much less densely populated, with various additional compounding aspects: social stratification, with many segments of society living mostly in their own areas, and lesser dependence on mass transport. Modern technology and abundance of land allows maintaining a degree of isolation when needed.

Secondly, the healthcare system in USA vs Netherlands is tale of semi-private vs nationalized system. The former has more incentives to be proactive and minimize costs, vs the later having incentives to make a good showing, with payments being assured anyway.

This is self-evident, both due to first-order and second-order effects. How the author manages to stand it on its head is amazing. It's worth noting that approaching, or exceeding, the capacity of the medical system (or any other) drives the costs sky high by and of itself - not to mention other, unrelated cases that also need treatment. With a few weeks worth of disruption to healthcare, even mild cases of other illnesses can spiral out of control and become costly (or even deadly) on their own.

I wouldn't read too much into a country having a muted or slow response to the pandemic; it's the expected outcome of political and economical systems differing across the globe. There is always a slow country to act, and its citizens might feel entitled to the kind of far-fetched speculation the author posted.

A fine sentiment, but still falls short of preserving & benefiting from the wisdom of the yore.

In the eternal battle of the new & better versus the old & tried & tested, the old & tried & tested may have been well reasoned, formulated, and described in the past.

But then again it might have never been reasoned through; instead it might have evolved, might have undergone a process of natural selection, might have won long term battle of ideas without being understood. The reasons might not have been explicitly known at any point in the past.

A good idea doesn't necessarily appear good, even on closer examination. There are some counter-intuitively good ideas; for example using random, stochastic processes[1] can yield better results than strict plans in face of partial information. For another example, we humans are pretty bad at understanding exponential and other non-linear processes (cue the present Coronavirus worries), and any reasoning based on estimation of several interacting non-linear effects tends to diverge wildly from reality. Not only our human ability to rationalize is limited, at times we aren't even aware that our ideas were suboptimal, and that there are whole classes of possible better solutions. Conversely, there are several XIX and XX century ideologies, programs, projects etc. that were well grounded in reasoning, but turned out to have led to such terrible results that we decided to never try them again.

There is a slow- but constantly-running natural selection of ideas, customs, traditions, organizational schemas, cultural trends, etc. The better ones tend to become more successful, and establish themselves as part of the culture. Some of the selected ideas won't be fully reasoned through or even understood at that time, and that is fine. Just like we make technical & business decisions with imperfect, partial information, we need to be able to handle the past customs, ideas etc., with partial, or even missing, reasoning behind them. Having been successful in the longer term is also a pretty good indicator of their qualities.

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[1] in context of a hunter-gatherer society, using supernatural divination for making hunting plans has no rational basis, but in certain natural settings yields optimal results due to essentially random nature of the divination

Yeah, we seem to have strayed a bit too much towards the turn-key end of the spectrum.

IMO both have their rightful place on an open market. The problem with managing building from blocks is that it requires innovation for end results, and, as the saying goes, "Innovation is hard to schedule" (with apologies to Dan Fylstra).

"first lightbulb", "first automobile", "first airplane flight", "first color photograph" etc. are always arbitrary thresholds; much ink has been spilled over who, when, and where; over what exactly makes a lightbulb or whatever else. "First rocket" was probably constructed & launched around the time of gunpowder invention, i.e., in the 9th century China. That's not quite the same as reliably getting cargo & crew to the ISS.

In contrast, "first commercially successful" is about as clear-cut case of inventiveness and crossing a threshold as there can be: the product was made worth more than its costs, and thus became viable for large scale deployment. Whether by one big change or accretion of several smaller ones. Some key inventions regarded manufacturing process rather than the end product itself, and thus are easily lost on a casual observer.

Commercially viable means a fleeting dream got turned into an ever growing reality for us all. To wit, we already have had some /nuclear fusion reactors/ up and running. But we will only perceive it as a real thing when it becomes commercially viable.

It's a good reference point, even if there are some key differences worth mentioning.

First up, an airliner fuselage is specced for tens of thousands of pressure cycles; needs to sustain the wear & tear, accumulated stress, and distortion. The rocket needs to handle maybe a dozen pressure cycles at most, and it is feasible to only handle one cycle for first few experimental vehicles.

Secondly, the airliner fuselage has much more complex shape, due to conflicting needs for aerodynamics, attachment of wings & control surfaces, etc.. This, together with varying materials and large openings concentrates stresses in key points. The rocket tank is as close to a big dumb uniform pipe as you can get. Even better, a rocket may rely on internal pressure for structural rigidity, while airliner needs to handle depressurization.

Lastly, the Starship is designed to survive re-entry, thus heat resistance is a major concern there; not anymore for an airliner ever since the Concorde SSTO got retired.

The compounding importance of mass is one factor here, but only half the story. The other half is how SpaceX' quick iterations and ability to retire vehicles early allows ample room to experiment and also to shave off safety factors.

In the more mundane aerospace engineering mass is quite important, but the manufacturing, servicing, longevity etc. are pretty important considerations too. A typical airplane is designed for manufacture of some 200 ... 2000 units and to remain in use for 1 ... 3 decades. This, together with the usual requirement for human flight ratings, ends up dictating rather high safety margins for designs.

Contrast that with SpaceX' vehicles which are supposed to perform a dozen unmanned flights each at most, and where one-way mission of a vehicle is a perfectly feasible strategy for testing while still making decent revenue.

Quick iterations get shit done in aerospace. Among historical examples, that's how MacCready's Gossamer Albatross[1] record-breaker came to be, where other teams failed.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacCready_Gossamer_Albatross

That's feasible due to the requirements being narrow and specific, and also well understood by a team close to the team building those machines.

Contrast that with expensive & slow-to-build machines available on the general market, where the requirements are broad, under-specified, and always shifting.

Just yesterday in fact, while implementing a state machine. Except the developers of that particular language explicitly did away with GOTO, so I ended up approximating it with a SWITCH/CASE. At least the language supports fall-through...

Which is to say, people differ in judgements of various features (footguns vs swiss army knifes). Moreover, the judgements seem to oscillate as fashions, in ~10 year long cycles. Please recall how exceptions and templates used to be a hot thing back in the day. Ditto garbage collectors. Presently we're all in love with Rust, and the "JITs considered harmful" paper will drop any day now.

Partly, but less so.

Human language vocabularies approximate Huffman Coding - the more frequently used words (and phrases) tend to be proportionally shorter. This is a gradual process for spoken languages, and somewhat quantized for written languages.[1] It's possible because with human languages, "close" is "good enough"; one can read english written with ye olde orthography, if with a bit of extra effort.

Less so in the lifespans of particular programming languages. Per Postel's law we tend to be liberal with extending but conservative with breaking backward compatibility. I think the case of command line tool parameters is particularly conservative for various reasons; among them because the 'knowledge' of options is spread among multitude of separate project - many of them obscure and bespoke - and coordination would be nigh impossible.

However there are some signs of similar trends; note how the "function" and "integer" and similar keywords of older languages tend to turn into "fn" and "int" in newer languages.

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[1] Not sure if there's a comparable process for grammars, but I guess it's a fair bet...?

  ps aux

  rsync -rave ssh SOURCE DESTINATION

That's an advantage; Plan 9 provides awk for those use cases. There is a clear separation, and a simple yet powerful language for communication (pipes, file descriptors, and files).

>bash is trying to be a full scripting language these days

Arguably Bash over-did somewhere around the time they added support for TCP connections

  exec {FD}<>/dev/tcp/news.ycombinator.com/80; echo GET / >&$FD; cat <&$FD

Another example: the modern Bash shell vs the Plan 9's Rc shell. The difference in documentation is over tenfold, with the latter still being more less laden with gotchas:

  $ man bash | wc -w
  48189
  $ 9 man rc | wc -w
  3264

There is the problem of sourcing. Per the Wikipedia's policies[0], any contributions must be grounded in reliable sources, which in case of recent events boils down to big name news publications. Given that most of the big name media seems to gravitate towards either progressive, or socialist views, the contributions are likely to end up with a derived slant.

The other aspect is notable in cases of a conflict between the netizens (or generally the consumers) and the media[1], where Wikipedia is self-bound to side with the media's reporting on themselves. As far as I can tell, Wikipedia has no provision for resolution of this conflict of interest.

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[0] "If no reliable sources can be found on a topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources

[1] terribly sorry about bringing up the specter of echo Tnzretngr pbagebirefl | rot13 in 2020

My intent was to satirize the incredulity or even outrage conveyed in certain comments; should've chosen a better format for that.

Some people are okay with occasional tech hiccups as the price of pushing the frontier forward. I hereby thank the brave beta-testers, and hold them above the people who expect perfection the first time out of the gate.

Now if they went for a Death Valley trip in the car that'd have been entirely different story - one of irresponsibility and needless risk taking. But as things were, they suffered only a major inconvenience and no appreciable risk to life and limb, due to maintaining sensible proximity to civilization.

On a lighter note, please consider the histories of Alice Ramsey[1] - first woman to drive cross USA, and Bertha Benz[2] - first woman to drive cross a country, having financed the development of the car. Both encountered malfunctions and other mishaps, solved problems & persevered, and earned fame and appreciation. Both also added to the popularization & development of the technology.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Huyler_Ramsey

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Benz#First_cross-countr...

Same for me.

Frankly I accept HN is a space to discuss a limited range of subjects, and keep other subjects to elsewhere. It's annoying to a degree, but it the longer run it works.

Way to start with a false premise. The main way on HN is efforts, both by mods and by users, to buoy up good content, and push down bad content.

>[is to] remove some of the anonymity

Not even close. Preventing cheap creation of new identities isn't inherently tied to identification of users; there already deployed alternatives.

One example, TeamSpeak uses proof of work - a computational process that's expensive to perform and cheap to verify - to protect identity creation. Works wonders, and allows anonymity just fine.

At any rate, the thrust of my argument is different, and cuts deeper into your idea:

any automated process, any guaranteed outcome, will be subverted and put to bad ends. To grow & maintain a good community you need active management by intelligent agents (ordinarily, people). And not just by selected mods - it helps when typical user is well aware what is up and able to fend for himself.

I wish it was this simple :^)

Consider Facebook, where people post mostly under their own name and photo. Even a casual visit to Facebook quickly reveals your hypothesis is wrong; it's nearly the exact opposite of reality.

Contrast that with HN, where users range from pseudonymous to fully anonymous, and where discussion is kept to a much higher standard.

It bears repeating - the discourse on HN is kept to a much higher standard. Active moderation and community guiding, performed by intelligent agents, is the real answer to the woes. Anything automatic, anything with a guaranteed outcomes will be 'gamed' and put to bad ends.

--edit--

There's also the separate but equally important matter of privacy. As internet spaces became both the town square and also gentlemens' clubs and also private homes to multitude of discourses, we need privacy from various actors' prying eyes.

The most relevant extension - uBlock Origin - works just fine on mobile Firefox.

It's a real game changer, especially with screen real estate and energy usage being quite important on mobile.

That extension alone is why I have and use Firefox on mobile phones (aside of the usual compatibility testing on other browsers for certain web projects).

The analytics is most likely blocked by common adblock rules. And present-day Firefox users are quite likely to be advanced users, running adblock.

Thus Firefox ends up being under-represented in the analytics.

The older LCDs were backlit with (cold cathode) fluorescent lamps, and those lamps do fade out and shift in color over time. With those you do want to adjust calibration once in a while. No idea how modern LCD backlit ones fare in longer run.

At one point I've had two decent quality CCFL LCDs set side-by-side; one had about 10'000 hours, the other 40'000 hours. The difference in color (and in brightness) was notable, and not quite possible to get right with the basic RGB calibration provided.

OHTF Vg'f uneq gb hfr guvf pbzznaq jvgubhg fvatvat.

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[1] http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/1/yesterday