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jffon The Plan 9 Effect or why you should not fix it if it isn't broken

Inferno isn't Plan 9. Written by the same people, yes, but it's a different OS running on a virtual machine rather than x86, different programming language, etc. The main commonality is 9P, which enables some other similarities such as Acme, synthetic filesystems, etc.

jffon The Plan 9 Effect or why you should not fix it if it isn't broken

By "the actual product" you mean "a completely different OS written on a virtual machine that happens to also run on Plan 9", then yes. Inferno has 9P, it has a lot of the same good stuff as Plan 9, but there's a pretty big gulf between the two and fluency in one does not translate to fluency in the other.

jffon Facebook and Twitter pledge to remove hate speech within 24 hours

Today I learned the New Black Panthers are literally the only source of left-wing hate.

jffon The Plan 9 Effect or why you should not fix it if it isn't broken

I'm sure the guy who thinks it's spelled "Plan-9" has some very insightful things to say. Maybe it's time for me to blog about Ruby/On/Rails, the latest web-dev hotness.

jffon A2: Analog Malicious Hardware [pdf]

That was Ken Olsen

jffon Facebook Censors User for Mentioning Censorship

Remember you said this if they ever decide to censor someone you agree with.

jffon What Americans ate on an average day, for the past several decades

I think a lamb roast, lightly seasoned before roasting, is one of the finest meals you can get. The flavor of the meat is exceptional, and you really owe it to yourself to try it if you can.

Costco sells lamb roasts for a reasonable price. This looks like a pretty decent recipe, although I never make sauce for my lamb--it's certainly juicy enough as-is: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/emeril-lagasse/rosemary-a...

Another great use for the Costco lamb: cube it, marinade it in French dressing for a few hours, then make kebabs alternating the lamb cubes, chunks of bacon, and pineapple pieces. Cook it on the grill, it's fantastic.

jffon How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

Mine has the pharmacy just inside the doors and a cooler right next to the checkout counters filled with milk. You do, however, have to walk past a big cooler full of delicious cheese and fresh sushi pretty much as soon as you enter the door :)

jffon What Americans ate on an average day, for the past several decades

We just don't have a big culture of eating lamb for whatever reason. It may be a result of how the country was settled: sparse population, big open spaces with often harsh weather and large predators (coyotes, wolves, and mountain lions), long distance travel needed to bring the animals to market. I could see those factors favoring larger animals like cattle, smaller animals like chickens which can be raised locally, and "easy" animals like pigs. My family used to raise sheep and they definitely had a tendency to die easy, however delicious they are.

jffon Inferno: A compact OS for building cross-platform distributed systems

I'd be interested in talking about the phone project in more detail... I'll even sign an NDA if the startup still exists, or just generally talk about Inferno. We have probably communicated on the Inferno list in the past, actually, but since neither of us have contact info in our profiles you can reach me at this disposable address for the initial contact:

alt.za-2othz2qa@yopmail.com

jffon Inferno: A compact OS for building cross-platform distributed systems

If you want to make a 9P interface to SMS without running Hellaphone, you should start by looking into the RIL daemon. If I remember correctly, it runs at the Linux level (not Java) and drops a socket somewhere. The Java libraries for making phone calls, texts, etc. work by sending commands to that socket. You can read/write that socket yourself and use it to e.g. send SMS

jffon Inferno: A compact OS for building cross-platform distributed systems

Only takes about 30 seconds to recompile the OS, though.

jffon Inferno: A compact OS for building cross-platform distributed systems

I've written a good bit of Inferno and one thing that's really neat is how closely related Limbo (the programming language) is to Go. There's good reason for this, of course-the guys who wrote Inferno went off to Google and made Go. The Tk GUI capabilities are a bit annoying to work with, but it's really not hard to whip up a GUI application in Inferno quickly--all the while getting to interact with those 9P servers which make data exchange really simple.

jffon I went to the hospital to give birth and tested positive for meth

> My doula rubs lavender essential oil on my temples, and my husband plays “Push It,” the Spotify playlist I created for labor and delivery. I have a photo of Beyoncé propped up on the over-bed table, because if anything can inspire me, it’s Queen Bey. Also on the table is my birth plan, which is kind of like a wish list for delivery. That includes modest requests, like keeping the door to my room closed, as well as more imperative things, like, “Please delay all routine procedures on the baby until after the bonding and breastfeeding period.”

> The bulk of my produce was organic, my drinking water purified through a reverse-osmosis system. I used clove oil on a persistent toothache instead of visiting the dentist, because I didn’t want any anesthetic to pass through my body and into the placenta. During all 42 weeks, the hardest drugs that entered my body were prenatal vitamins and puffs from my prescription asthma inhaler.

"But... I'm white! I'm middle-class! I have a doula! It's patently absurd that these nurses could think I did drugs! Just look at me! What do you mean that's exactly what a drug user would say?"

From her point of view she's a perfect mommy, but as far as the nurses and doctors know, she's just somebody who showed up pregnant with meth in her system and an unlicensed hippie who's smearing lavender oil around the place.

jffon Google Home

You probably have on in your pocket already, is the thing.

(I agree though, I don't want this in my house, and I turned off the "Ok Google" functionality on my phone)

jffon The slow death of purposeless walking (2014)

Man, how many people are doing this? There was a guy on the Something Awful forums who tried this, but his cart was a tow-behind bicycle trailer that he was pushing by hand and a wheel broke after less than 20 miles... also he hadn't been eating anything so he called an Uber and went home. It's probably for the best because his route took him through Nevada and New Mexico in the height of summer.

Does your friend also cite Hobo Nick as inspiration?

jffon British tea consumption has been going down

I was trying to guess what it would be as I clicked... I figured it would be drinking tea, but the other candidates were:

- Unspoken but rigidly-followed rules of decorum

- Comedy that's mostly about someone breaking said unspoken rules of decorum as the people around him sit stone-faced

- Eating boring food

- Extremely good rock and roll

- Classism

jffon We asked 15,000 people how they're learning to program

https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/800/1*HsD7w8Y1rQL9...

Looks like my job is secure, then

jffon Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP

> learn everything all the way from NAND and NOR gates, up to 7400 series IC's, to microprocessors, to assembly language, to C (portable assembly), to operating systems internals, to TCP/IP, HTTP internals, to HTML, and ultimately to Javascript, and also including a side order of databases, filesystems, machine learning/AI, etc.

It's called a Computer Engineering degree, sometimes called EECS (as at MIT). I did it and you can too. The Javascript and HTML were self-taught, admittedly, because they're the easiest parts of that list.

jffon Mother Tongues

One of my friends once told me, "We don't have spelling bees in India... it wouldn't make sense, when you hear the word there's really only one way to spell it."

I on the other hand can't hear the difference between Hindi "b", "v", "g", and "k" half the time :)

jffon Mother Tongues

I'm a little puzzled at his complaint that he can't transliterate Devanagari; although I've only learned some of the basics as I attempt to learn Hindi, it's not particularly challenging--it's just an alphabet (alphasyllabary if you want to be pedantic)

jffon One-third of SF Bay Area residents hope to leave soon, poll finds

They depreciate like they are cars because Japan focuses on the new. You don't buy a house, you buy the land, knock down the existing house, and build a new one. You don't buy a used car, you buy a new one unless you're broke. There's precious little used market for anything, which can be a boon to those of us who want to buy nice used film cameras from Japanese ebay sellers.

jffon GNU LibreJS

> Sometimes I think RMS would be happier if the web had just stopped development after the release of the Mosaic browser

Sometimes I look at modern websites and think I'd be happier too.

jffon ACM 2015 Technical Award Recipients

You're allowed to say "fucking" on HN.

jffon Stopping All Stations – The Pyongyang Metro

> It isn't a meaningful date for anybody

It's actually a very meaningful date to a lot of people on this planet, although I'm not one of them.

We used to refer to years past that date using a short phrase in a dead language. However, this short phrase in a dead language referred to a religious figure, which is Not OK. So we decided we'd rename it "Common Era" but keep the numbers the same because that would be a big hassle. As a result, our calendar still counts how many years have passed since the alleged birth of Christ, but because people might be offended by the words "Anno Domini" we've called it something different.

If I were in the position to pick a new calendar start date, I'd probably just go with the Unix Epoch... AE, Anno Epocha? We'd now be in the year 46AE :)

jffon Stopping All Stations – The Pyongyang Metro

What makes it so Common? What great event occurred on the year 1 CE that we decided we should start marking our years from that point? Ovid writing "Metamorphoses"?

jffon Kindle Unlimited scammers on Amazon

It was full of trash back when it was paid per "borrow" too. People would crank out dozens of 30-page erotica shorts per month, and each time one of those was read they got paid as much as the author of a 300-page novel. More, in fact, because IIRC the criteria for "user has read enough of the story, time to pay the author" was set as a percentage of the length... so the guy spamming shorts got paid after a page or two, but the novelist didn't get paid until the reader stuck it out through a couple chapters.

jffon The caffeine curse: why coffee shops have always signalled urban change

See: almost anyone in San Francisco complaining about "tech bros"

jffon The FBI Director Puts Tape Over His Webcam

Like this: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/21g%2Bop3AZBL.jpg

jffon Study: Students who take notes by hand outperform students who type

Yeah, I tried taking notes on my laptop a few times in engineering classes before I realized how hard it is to sketch digital logic in an emacs text buffer!

Even the guy who used a Windows tablet with Onenote didn't actually use it much... and now that I have a Surface for work, I hardly use it as a tablet, I just carry a notebook with me.