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jonjackyon Ask HN: Math books you recommend just for the way they are written?

Measurement by Paul Lockhart

jonjackyon Ask HN: Book recommendations about the history of the internet

The standard answers for this are:

Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, about the origins of the Internet.

Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee, about the origins of the World Wide Web.

jonjackyon Ask HN: What are the best tutorial sites for Python?

Seconding Alan Downey's Think Python. The current online version is here:

https://greenteapress.com/wp/think-python-2e/

For code examples, I like Peter Norvig's pytudes:

https://github.com/norvig/pytudes

jonjackyon A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman

I used Berkeley's Franz LISP ...That was a compiler which generated .o files. ... But you didn't link the .o files; you had to load them into the development environment to run them. Compiling was just an optimization.

That sounds the same as Python and Java work now. For python, you have .py source code files or .pyc or .pyo compiled files, but you still have to load them into the Python interpreter.

I asked the Franz LISP devs why they didn't provide a runtime you could just link in, yielding a releaseable executable program without all the baggage for breaking and debugging.

Even now, you typically need to have Python or Java installed on your computer to run Python or Java programs. There are ways to generate standalone Python executables but it's not the usual way of working.

jonjackyon The German School of Lisp (2011)

For the same reason as there are many algol-like languages.

I remember in the 1980s someone remarked that C and Pascal were more similar than Maclisp and Interlisp.

jonjackyon Unix as a tool forge and how Emacs fits in Unix philosophy

Some of the original Bell Labs Unix people have a very austere view of the Unix philosophy.

In their view, it all started to go wrong -- Unix began to depart from the founding principles -- as early as 1978. In their view, Berkeley Unix does not follow their Unix philosophy -- they don't like network sockets, for example, whose design was mostly imported from some earlier non-Unix system (maybe Tenex?).

Some of this attitude appears in Rob Pike's 'Good, Bad and Ugly' talk from 2001 [1]. He says the early Unix tools approach had, by then, already been replaced for most users by big do-everything programs: Emacs, Perl, browsers...

1. http://herpolhode.com/rob/ugly.pdf

jonjackyon Unix as a tool forge and how Emacs fits in Unix philosophy

One of the original Unix creators, Doug McIlroy, credited with inventing pipes, wrote in [1]:

"... I have always detested emacs and vi. With ^D, ^C, and ^\, Unix has more than enough mystery chords to learn. Emacs and vi raised that number to a high power ...

... Unix was born of a taste for achieving big power by small means rather than by unbounded accumulation of facilities. But evolution, including the evolution of Unix, does not work that way. ..."

The editors favored by the original Unix guys are ed, sam, and acme.

1. https://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2014-August/006506.ht...

jonjackyon Ask HN: A place to publish half-formed thoughts?

https://www.halfbakery.com/editorial/help.html - "The halfbakery is a communal database of poorly thought-out ideas for inventions. ..."

jonjackyon LGP-30 found in basement, the same model of drum computer programmed by “Mel”

The LGP-30 made ingenious, economic use of the technology available in the mid-1950s.

Even the CPU registers were on the drum memory. The control panel displayed the register contents on a small oscilloscope - it showed the bits as they rolled by the read head!

jonjackyon Ask HN: Operating Systems built with functional languages?

Haskell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_(operating_system)

Haskell: https://github.com/GaloisInc/HaLVM

OCaml: https://mirage.io/

ML: http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/47545

Lisp: In the 1970s and 1980s there were Lisp Machines with the OS written in Lisp. Too many sources to link here, they are often discussed on HN. They were marketed in the 1980s by Symbolics, LMI, and Xerox.

Also in the 1970s and 1980s there were computers running Smalltalk standalone - in effect, an OS in Smalltalk. They provided introspection.

jonjackyon Ask HN: Books that teach you to think

How To Solve It by G. Polya [1,2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It

2. https://archive.org/details/howtosolveitnewa00pl

jonjackyon Ask HN: Where to start writing a OS/kernel?

Here are some sites that provide instructions and examples for building operating systems:

[6.S081](https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2019/index.html) (MIT, xv6 RISC-V, 2019), [6.828](http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2018/xv6.html) (MIT, xv6 x86, 2018), [CS140e](http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs140e/) (Stanford, RPi C, 2019), [CS140e](https://downey.io/blog/cs140e-writing-an-operating-system-in...) (Stanford, RPi Rust, 2018, more on [HN](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16134618), [Andre](https://github.com/rust-embedded/rust-raspi3-OS-tutorials) (RPi Rust, 2019), [CS140](http://www.scs.stanford.edu/12au-cs140/) (Stanford, 2012), [CS194-24](http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~kubitron/courses/cs194-24-S13/in...) (Berkeley), [Baking Pi](http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projects/raspberrypi/tutorials/os/) (Cambridge, RPi asm, 2012), [OS from Scratch](http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~exr/lectures/opsys/10_11/lectures/...) (Birmingham, more in [HN](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8380822)), [OS Development](http://littleosbook.github.io/), (RIT Stockholm, more on [HN](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13258063)), [these](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4834008) (CMU, UMD, MIT, Stanford, Harvard), [BrokenThorn](http://www.brokenthorn.com/Resources/OSDevIndex.html), [bkerndev](http://www.osdever.net/bkerndev/index.php), [JamesM](http://www.jamesmolloy.co.uk/tutorial_html/) ... [OSDev.org](http://wiki.osdev.org/) is recommended in many sources. Here is a recent roundup on [HN](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22087701), and [another](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22149866) (both Jan 2020). This [textbook](http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/) provides a recent overview of Unix + C OS.

jonjackyon Ancient Nuclear Plant Computer Finds New Home in Bletchley Museum

The "ancient computer" is a Ferranti Argus 500 computer from the early 1970s.

jonjackyon Why read Dostoevsky? A programmer's perspective

"I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already." -- Nick Jenkins

jonjackyon Snakeware – Linux distro with Python userspace inspired by Commodore 64

Previously, Jun 2020, 158 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23391380

jonjackyon MicroVAX 78032

The thing is that Unix(of the day)'s source wasn't full of 100s of pages of vax assembly code ...

VMS wasn't all vax assembly either. VMS and a lot of VAX system software was mostly written in BLISS [1], a high level language intended for systems programming that was created about the same time as C. It was all there for customers to read in a big stack of microfiche cards delivered with each machine. I remember being shown the code for the VMS scheduler or maybe the dispatcher which was 'a page or two of (VAX) assembly' - I recall it was pointed out that it was one of the (few) places in VMS that did use assembly.

I don't know how portable the BLISS code for VMS was, but there were BLISS compilers for several other machines besides the VAX.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLISS

jonjackyon Is there a Sci-Fi novel where people discover they live in simulated reality?

Time Out Of Joint [1] by Philip K. Dick -- from 1959! -- has the classic example of a character discovering he lives in a simulated reality. But it only has one level of simulation.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Out_of_Joint

jonjackyon Why does a librarian own MetaFilter?

Here are some miscellaneious links to Ask Metafilter that I saved. (Sorry about the poor formatting, but the links appear to work.)

jonjackyon DBOS: A database-oriented operating system

This 1981 paper by Stonebreaker, Operating System Support for Database Management [1], explains why conventional file systems are not a good foundation for databases. He writes:

"The bottom line is that operating system services in many existing systems are either too slow or inappropriate. Current DBMSs usually provide their own and make little or no use of those offered by the operating system. ..."

Now, 40+ years later, Stonebreaker is a participant in the present DBOS project!

1. http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~awang/courses/cop5611_s2022/os_databa...

jonjackyon Hacker Public Radio, episode 3675: Plan 9 – An exercise in futility

Good article, strange title. It's a description of the Plan 9 operating system, including its rationale, history, availability, contents, and the author's experiences using it. I don't see how it's an 'exercise in futility', I hope that's not driving readers away.

jonjackyon 50 years Smalltalk anniversary celebration at Computer History Museum

A recent start on this could be the NopSys/CogNos project, which built a standalone Smalltalk system on x86 a few years ago. There are GitHub repos[1,2,3] and a paper [4] where the authors write "there would certainly be much more work needed before one could consider deploying our system." The project seems to be inactive now.

1. https://github.com/nopsys/nopsys

2. https://github.com/nopsys/CogNOS

3. https://github.com/nopsys/SmalltalkNOS

4. https://charig.github.io/assets/papers/SCDE-DLS.pdf

jonjackyon Ted Nelson on What Modern Programmers Can Learn from the Past (2018)

...(Nelson) never actually made something that actual people actually use.

Actually, he did. He wrote and self-published the big book Computer Lib/Dream Machines, which was ubiquitous and influential in the 1970s. More about that book and its influence here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22176769

jonjackyon Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming (1992)

Yes, check out the mostly non-AI, non-Lisp advice in Norvig's very brief summary in What Lessons are in PAIP?, the next to last section in http://norvig.com/Lisp-retro.html

jonjackyon Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming (1992)

PAIP is full of practical programming techniques and advice that are not at all specific to AI or even Lisp. Other commenters here have cited Norvig's retrospective on his book at

http://norvig.com/Lisp-retro.html

The next to last section in this, What Lessons are in PAIP? comprises 52 numbered sentences of advice, cross-referenced to fuller explanations in the book. Many (most?) of them apply to any programming or software engineering, not specifically AI or Lisp.

jonjackyon Byte Magazine Special Issue: Smalltalk (1984)

I recall Smalltalk had the first unit testing framework, which became a model for other languages.

jonjackyon Ask HN: More “experimental” UIs for editing/writing code?

Light Table [1,2] attracted a lot of attention here [3] several years ago. The author went on to make another system called Eve [4].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_Table_(software)

2. https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable

3. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=light+table

4. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=eve+chris+granger

jonjackyon Cardpunch: Punch a punched card

There was indeed often a colored stripe at the top of the card. At computer centers I used, this stripe was used to indicate what JCL (job control language) statement was on the card. So the computer center would have a big stack of pink cards already punched with the statement to invoke the FORTRAN compiler, for example. The teacher told you to put a pink card at the front of your FORTRAN deck before you submitted it, or it wouldn't work.

jonjackyon RISC-V based single board computers are getting there

Payments, payroll, inventory, invoicing. ...

This was widely done with tube computers in the 1950s. The first commercial computer, Univac, was introduced in 1951.

Medical imaging gone except for maybe the x-ray.

The first commercial CT scanner in the 1970s used a Data General Nova minicomputer, which used small-scale integrated circuit logic chips, but did not include a microprocessor.

Behind the scenes all kinds of process control would disappear ...

The early PDP-8 minicomputers introduced in 1965 used discrete transitors, no integrated circuits. They were used in industrial control applications.

jonjackyon RISC-V based single board computers are getting there

You don't need chips for computers. Until the mid-1960s no computers used chips. The early PDP-8 models (introduced beginning in 1965) were desktop minicomputers made entirely with discrete transistors and magnetic core memories. They were used in lots of automated process-control applications.

There is some confusion in this question and many of the reponses here between any electronics (computation and control using tubes dates from WWII at least), transistors (which became widely available in the mid-1950s, all-transistor computers reached the market in 1959), small scale integrated circuits that contained (for example) several logic gates or a few flip-flops (which reached the market in the mid-late 1960s) which were used to build computers but also many simpler electronic control devices, and finally microprocessors which finally reached the market about 1975.

Any electronics that reached the market before the mid or late 1970s did not use microprocessors. For example, the first commercial CT scanner used a Data General Nova minicomputer, which used small-scale integrated circuit logic gates, but did not use a microprocessor. The original Pong arcade game used around 60 small-scale integrated circuit logic gates, but no microprocessor.

If we didn't have integrated circuits, but were stuck with 1959 discrete transistors, or we didn't have microprocessors, but were stuck with 1974 small-scale integrated circuits, we could still have a pretty hi-tech world. There would be more emphasis on optimized design of special-purpose devices - that original Pong game is an example.

jonjackyon Police say people pretending to play violin for money a 'nationwide issue'

It happens. See "Milli Violini: I was a fake violinist in a world-class miming orchestra", a review of Sounds Like Titanic by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23440333