oscargrouch

Your comment can tell us a lot how technological progress works.

For instance, Mark Zuckerberg worked a couple of months to code Facebook on PHP, and be cheered as a computer wizard all over the world..

But we often forget the decades of work on Browsers/Web/Web 2.0, PHP, MySQL, OS's, internet protocols, etc.. not even taking into account the try-and-fail technologies (like SOUP et al.)

I think this is very unfair, because its like a bunch of people have worked hard pilling sheets of paper and when somebody put the last sheet of paper, somehow we forget about the guys who really make that tower and only the guy who put the top cherry, with the least effort is called a genius.

We get it that the world might see it like this, but here in HN we should understand that the real hard working geniuses are probably not getting the fame they deserve (with the exception of the likes like Linus Torvalds)

But guys like Zuckerberg, Jobs and Musk are definitely overated while Dennis Ritchie, Jeff Bonwick, Bill Joy, Rasmus Lerdorf, John von Neumann, Niklaus Wirth, etc.. are the people who we should really be thankful for, not just the guy who combine hard work to make something great and make billions of dollars out of it.

Out of topic, but this research reminds a lot me a movie gem from the 80's called "Alterate States".

In my "personal mystique" i have a hypothesis where the mind is really the stuff that our universe are made of. As in the universe is the product of something imagined, and giving we have the same medium that can navigate and permeate the universe we can become one with it, because in reality we are not apart from it, we just believe it and dont even try to advance into this reality where we can navigate the universe with our mind.

Im kind of shy to say this out loud here on HN with such a distinct crowd of people who really study those subjects, but given is more of a personal believe, i guess i can be forgiven if it sounds stupid or even a uninformed point of view.

The problem with this comparison is subjectivity. We will never know if they became better versions of their own self, nothing happened or the whole thing changed them for the worse, because we would need to access the parallel in time with their lives without the experience, to objectivelly understand the phenomena.

In their particular evolutionary ladder, how many stairs they jumped?

In the end the best way to understand this, is to understand what they tell you about themselves, how they were before and after the experience. It may not look much from your perspective, but it may be something better, from their point of view at least, then what was possible before..

I think this is more in the line of

"Si vis pacem, para bellum"

Its very important to protect the civilizatory process from fallout, as severe or black-swan conditions might swipe what we have acomplished so far, and history is full of examples of advanced civilizations that were vanished and we had to dig out from the mud slowly without a chance to learn, starting all over again from scratch.

The civilizatory process is fragile and is always menaced by all sides, all the time. Its good to be always vigilant and prepared to anything.

I agree with you that in some cases this is not even a choice to you. You will pay severely for this choice and you may not be willing to pay such a big price for acting ethically.

Thats why in a part of my former comment i've addressed other options, like moving to other products that actually create something good..

But anyway the important part is to remain conscious about this, even if you cant get out of the situation. Because the uneasy feeling might help you to recognize a good oportunity to change your situation.

The Nazism soldiers example shows cinism, like they knew what they were doing, they choose individually to do it, and when confronted they just blamed hierarchy. Somehow in the process they have lost their 'soul'.

Its very specific, and its not very much relatable to every case, but more like a cautionary tale, that we need to be aware of this, and keep or conciousness and our individual will as part of the whole.

What each one of us do matters in the whole, and we should be awake in every order we are executing when we are in a system where we need to follow orders.

> Each and every time a costumer buys an iPhone they're deciding.

You can buy the house from the company defining rules of how you should use the house you bought from them and denying you access to the things they forbid.

Lets suppose you have options to buy a house from the ones that does not do this, ok.. until the company who are ruling over your property are making a big buck, and they decide to play by the same rules..

so hey, where are your options to buy a house without vendor rules? thats right, their gone..

Only that we are talking about something much more important here which has to do with data..

Private companies should never be allowed to do this, unless they offer options (other app stores should be possible), and have rules to filter who can offer apps to your device that dont damage your freedom of choice (dont forbid things on political views, taste, harassing competition, etc..).

Android is becoming more akin to Apple each day, and what you have in the end is a false sense of choice.

This is why the rule of law and a functioning government is so important.

> Adobe decided to do a half-assed flash player for the Mac.

Than if it will deliver a crappy experience, let the user decide for his own. Suppose the user agree with Apple/Jobs here and dont like to use it, but theres that tool that are available only in Flash, you need it for your mechanical enginnering job for instance.. You had a choice, a bad one, yes, but now you have none. Just because 'simon says' so..

And we are not even thinking about the small players with less resources than Adobe, that will not have the resources to make the "good experience" by whatever standards imposed by the overlord dujour.

And thats because we are assuming good faith, because the ruler of your own property, can even lie about be doing this for your own sake, and just use this to bar the competition.

By the way i never touch anything Apple because of this, but because they were the ones who leaded the smartphone industry, the rules they have specified in the beggining tend to be copied by the competition, and to become the norm.

Its not the same as creating a new car company in the XXI century where we have standards, good rules, etc..

The pioners have the power to define the reality of the industry in years to come. And giving its about our digital life, its becoming more and more important each day.

Data and digital platforms are in the XXI century what the oil was in the XX century. Pervasive, powerful, defining everything else.

Is up to the user to decide that, not the platform middle-man.

Its funny how many people are willing to give up their freedom to decide what works best for them, and let others decide, in the name of "im doing all this for your own good".

You should always have the right to decide what technology to use, what you install and download on your device.

The whole app store deciding what they allow or not, not giving you any other alternative, should be deemed inconstitutional in a society who knows whats happening, when people have nowhere else to go because the digital dictatorship is in control of your digital life.

This whole trend smells digital feudalism to me, and it was Jobs that started this whole dangerous trend to the bottom of our civil liberties.

Why are you defending this new feudal lord who are mining your right to choose what you do with your own property?

If after having bought a house, the guy(or company) who have selled to you, had made some demands of how you could use the kitchen, or the bedroom, would you think its within his right to do so?

Your post somehow remind me of the most proeminent excuse in the Nuremberg trials.

"We were just following orders".

You are right that regulation play a very important part into this, but this should not be a excuse to releave ourselves from the burden that in the end we are responsible for everything we do, even under orders, under a chain of command or whatever.

Proper regulation is a good goal, but in the meantime, making a ethical stand in what we do, is very important, because the moral corruption can spread faster than the regulation, and in the end, there will be no individual ethical behavior nor proper regulation.

People should not just try to quit their jobs just because they work in a big company (maybe) doing shady stuff, because you may be in a job that actually create something good, or even if thats not the case, you can try to move to another product or team..

But if you are working in a core part that are doing unethical things, i guess trying to hide behind the company can work like a placebo for your guilty, but i bet it wont work after a short period of time.

I dont think is that much easy, because it will be a different kind of game, in a different world, and maybe in the meantime what we understand of the industry (serial production of goods) can change a lot in the future.

First theres human behavior into play, and consumerism. We have been changing a lot of our daily habits through time, because we now live much more in the digital realm, making a lot of phisical things less valuable. We are sharing more, using less goods made of plastic, wood, steel. Our relation to nature and the climate change will force us to rethink the way we behave, our consumerism, what we use and how we use it. The demand will probably drop also because we are making less babies..

For instance automation, AI, Solar, batteries, and 3d printing can make it cheaper to produce things in your home.

And if we still have the same industry in the future, China has a lot of people, and with the industrial park they have now, even with salaries getting higher, it would be not easy even for India to take that spot. This people are insanelly productive already.

Also, if they reach the next level, which is pure automation, it doesnt matter how cheap and productive other humans will be, it will never be enough.

The only way to take the spot from China now will be a industrial paradigm shift, and i gave some examples of how this may happen.

Predicting the future is really hard, and is hardly as linear as we are inclined to think. (For instance what would be of US without WWI & WWII or without the Russian revolution of 1917? Both are 'black swan' events no one can predict that changes everything we know)

(Please, pardon me for any broken english i have in this text)

This is my feeling too. 'This ship already sailed' It was the fight to turned the document, information transparent world of the web into a application you run on the browser where you dont care about the output as a information piece, but only how the pixel have rendered.

The browsers themselves together with the companies that drive them, killed the web on its conceptual level, and now the browser is just a multi-platform engine to render apps that are located in remote servers (and lets not forget how they will push for cloud stack here, given the profits it will make for them).

The web got corrupted into its core concepts, and now is just a shadow of its former self.

The chip has potential to change the way we live, but this potential will only become reality when proper applications and bussiness models create really useful stuff around it.

I think seeing this tech as disruptive somehow is kind of obvious, but to change our lifes upside down it needs much more.

The same can be said about 3D printing. It has a lot of potential, but timing + the right ecosystem around it is also a big deal.

Apple with Newton, MS and specially Palm were there first for the pocket computer + phone, but why only with the iPhone things started to really happen?

The right bet + timing + ecosystem around it is also pretty important.

I remember building dial-up internet providers in the late nineties(97/98) here in Brazil as a teen, and some consulting folks trying to sell us some Solaris licenses, laughing at us because we were using Linux, 'that toy OS'.

It would be kind of easy to make a stand against the microsoft fanboys against NT 4, but it was much more difficult to make a good case of Linux against Solaris back then. (Remember Linux starting to be taken seriously by 2.2 and 2.4 period)

Also i got the same dismissive snarks, when installing and programing in PHP back then to make dinamic websites, in a world then taken by ASP and Cold Fusion. (And the other alternative in Unix were only Perl, for which i thank PHP for avoiding me the trouble).

It's a reminder for me, that the most common trend in IT sector is of folks with a "colonized" sort of mentality, that will fail to recognize the things that will turn into real things in the future.

It's sad when you think that its even worse than that, giving most people just show off and wait for their next paycheck. They dont even bother thinking in those things.

So the psychological profile of who are saying what is kind a very big deal, not just what they are saying.

I was thinking more in the line of classical philosophy. You have cartesianism and classical geometry shaped line of thinking on one side and taoist, confucionist, budhist line of thinking on the other.

Modern Japan is reshaped orient with ocidental cultural values, so sorry to use terms that can be misleading because i've failed to give a clear context of what i mean.

And you are right in the sense that some cultures are better than others to face uncertainty with a tenacious spirit.

the US culture is also good at this (despite the mixing of both), but my criticism is more target in the sense we need more awareness of uncertainty and where our tools of measure are limited and cannot reach.

People facing the uncertainty with a brave spirit can be deceived to think people judging them can measure them correctly and that some judgements are final.

Its pretty hard to be the one facing uncertainty, and to be judged by things the other side might not have to right tools to do it right.

Not forgeting, in the context we are talking about, a HN board would probably be the best to understand and to predict a lot of things correctly. But my guess is that we need more awareness and understand more a kind of philosophy that in my point of view, is more advanced to undertand problems that are beyond mesure and pratical reason.

In my point of view, theres a cultural ocidental tradition to fight uncertainty at any cost.

This lead us all to a very good economical and technological progress so far, but in a lot of cases i see this fight going too far, where we have pseudo-objective schemes of validation that are completely worthless and while they look a whole lot more 'scientific' their results are no better than rolling a dice.

We need to be aware that people validating this kind of stuff are using patterns based on their former experience to validate better what they are judging.

We need to pay attention and learn with their experience, but also be aware that their denial doesnt necessarily mean you wont make it, because its actually impossible for them to tell you this for sure.

They can only try to calculate who have better chances to succed. And a LOT of people that will actually succed wont get squared up in those patterns, because they are based in past events that are unlikely to repeat (paradigm shifts are pretty hard to predict for instance, because a lot of them come from 'black swan' kind of events).

So you maybe you have a bussiness plan so risky they will calculate that you are likely to fail, they are probably very good to understand the percentage of your sucess/fail rate.. but they hardly can understand your human value to deliver that dream, because this is most in the uncertainty arena.

Maybe some of them will follow their 'gut feeling' and do a very good bet.. but this is beyond what can be extimated, calculated or measured and we need to be very aware of that.

Theres no better teacher than persistence, but one that can learn with its mistakes. And this human-gold value along with others hardly will get detected over some pattern-based human radars.

So my main point is, in the end is up to you to create the means to succeed, and a lot of them have to do with human qualities where most of them cant be measured that way.

Its funny when you think about whats fair in this kind of stuff. For example if you use AppleSomething, apple is a fruit, was a famous record label before being a famous computing brand.

As theres a fruit before anything else, you can argue why you could have some rights over the brand. If is AppleOS of course you can have trouble because Apple the IT company have a OS and they might argue this is a common way people refer to iOS or MacOS.

But Lego is a whole different category. There is no well known concept of Lego before Lego was created, and theres a sort of mechanics and way of thinking that is totally associated with the idea of Lego because of the Lego toy.

So if you use Lego in that sense even if its for something else, they might reclaim the concepts name, because they actually invented not just a toy, but a toy with a concept of composability for which people might be inclined to reuse the name, not because of the toy, but the larger concept the toy represents.

Ok, we all know how a key-value store is not competitive with the current SQL db's. But lets remember all of this NOSQL trend started with the SQL databases being a poor fit for a distributed environment back in the day.

By the way, what i would actually love to have, is a LINQ like API abstracted over a key-value store, and access to a SQL AST also in the language.. For me i think this is the desired middle ground, where you can scale and compose data over key-value, but also not to be stuck with SQL data mappings inside your codebase.

I mean, a relational algebra API that deal with any KV store, be it LINQ or the backend of something like Presto (or the DataFrame of Spark).

If you need something like a SQL interface somewhere, you could build it by stitching the SQL AST with the engine you use directly in the language.

So, this is basically the build pipeline driver?

I remember hacking the original C++ version of this, trying to pass wasm target compilation flags back to the llvm just for fun.

What more can you get from this.. the ability to fiddle with the build process from Swift API? For consumers like package managers?

I guess it needs a little bit more of clarification, of what can be done with it.. i guess, a introduction to the API behind it would help, giving the target audience for this sort of thing.

I've changed a GN(chrome ninja build generator) to build Swift, and unlike C/C++ code where you compile each file, i had to create a different scheme to compile all source files into the the final object module file.

Wonder if i can call this instead of swiftc directly and if it would help somewhere.

Yes, this is much more into the spot.

But i think will be a long way til we reach tools that are more like that.

We are very dependent of the current data formats, software and tools, and going into this direction, would mean to leave a lot of working good stuff behind.

Just to add to this, more to the spot of your question, i think a no side-effect is often desirable, but i dont think it should be an impediment.

As you might need to call another function inside of our procedure that mutates some data.

But i think there are some sort of problems we are imposing to ourselves just because we need to deal with the millions possible ways a data could be laid out or modeled based in our type-system centric world.

In my perfect world, we should model functions in a DNA fashion, so function is also data, and if is mutable, could even be changed by the data depending of the what is in it.

First, we would never have to re-create a function again, and if we do, the data signature would be exactly the same as the other one created before, so we can match in a index for instance.

Im more inspired by the way things are done in the natural world, than the way we ended up shaping math (where the concepts of FP are more based on).

in Nginx HttpRequest/HttpResponse are larger abstractions but the "real fun" will happen at the buffers, where you will end up mostly manipulating bytes on the buffers.

The fact that we are creating arbitrary abstractions to represent data and imposing to others is actually the core issue here.

Supose we could set up the representation for the most things as a matrix. colors, words, sound, etc..

Than you can filter and process applying linear algebra, ML, etc..

I fell that the way we pack bytes, in arbitrary fashion, by mixing types is a core impediment for us to have a better experience with the program/data duality.

But i guess that all of this data centered, AI focused world will make us understand a better way to deal with both programs and data. The need to make our ML agents understand our world will probably change the way we deal with code and data.

I think one programming paradigm that is very underserved is something in the sorts of filters.

GPU shaders, Signal Processing or a Nginx filter are all on this line of thinking.

We should be more inclined into program things as filters where we manipulate and maybe mutate/transform the data that is passing through that filter, so this could be easily paralelized, cut a lot of expensive CPU branches and where humans and machines could work together making those filters. (It would be much easiar for an AI to infer/learn about how to program like this)

In this perspective how we layout and shape the data is much more important.. so if we could create new standards where we can represent anything as a matrix for instance, we could have state-of-the-art engines who would care about scheduling, compilation and paralelization so we could only focus on manipulate and transform data according to the goals of what we are trying to achieve.

> Also a request for any resources of scientists trying to get their head around how to write good software, we're all pretty much people who once read a C++ tutorial and just went with it.

I guess this is hard to find, because theres no generic way that will work for all programming languages and contexts.

But i will tell you where i often find them: directly in source code.

People that are really good at this, dont have time to teach, and if they teach, its hard to get to the point to teach the 'tricks' implemented directly in source code.

Also, im my experience, besides the generic algorithms and protocols that you can implement in any language, the rest is very much context dependent.

So in the context of C++, that you have mentioned, there are for instance, at least, two great C++ shops for great source code, experience and tricks that i particularly like: Google and Microsoft C++ stuff.

The problem with this approach, is that you have to be like a 'source code vulture', opening up the engines you are interested in, and willing to expend some time reading and understanding what the source code do.

With this you can match and map with the more abstract knowledge in the field.

I've learned A LOT reading others people source code, specially the 'canonical' pieces of software out there.

Something no book wandering over abstract ideas can taught you about (the first exception to this that comes to mind is Tanenbaum books about OS, but he made Minix as a source code realization of the ideas in the book, so...)

One of my dream side-projects is to create something inspired by Ken Thompson's C (the plan9 compiler), with some ideas borrowed for Go, where this "almost C" language could be written in a valid C just like you can do it with C++.

things like:

(Composing structs)

    struct Parent {int number}
    struct Child {Parent; int another_number} // anonymous struct convention

    Child c;
    c.number = 10;
    c.another_number = 11;

(Object notation, namespacing)

    int DoThis(Child* this, int input) {}
    Child* c ...
    c->DoThis(10)

(Someway to define public/private in structs and methods, like Go do with convention of Lowercase/Uppercase components/function names)

and Finally

(Someway to define a interface and use vtables when needed just like Go´s Interface but in a more C compatible way like.. )

    struct MyInterface {
     int (*Read)(int a, int b);
     int (*Write)(int a, int b);
    }

or

    struct MyInterface {
     int Read(int);
     int Write(char);
    }

    struct X {}

    int Read(X* this, int n) {}
    int Write(X* this, char c) {}

    X x = X{};

    x.Read(10);
    x.Write('b');  
    MyInterface* c = &x;

    (...)

(templates) - C++ way is fine

Thats it. With all this you would have "a better C", with compability with C codebase and still a language much simpler than C++, yet powerful.

Not the parent, but i understand this as the paradigm that containers and VM´s use for instance.

Your applications and executables are also part of the data and move together with them.

Im creating something that take this into account; you should have a embeddable/movable entity where you keep your data, api´s and apps. And i tell you its a lot of work..

Was following Sandstorm closely, and despite the fact that im going with different choices compared with Sandstorm, your project was one that i instantly recognized to be tackling in the same domain.

I mean, i think your meditation and problem solving are in the right place, we just need a couple more iterations , research and efforts to get there.

I will try to give it a shot too, been working on this on a couple of years over the chromium codebase, with a design that was not quite right in the beggining, that needed couple more of iteration and tought, but that in the current incarnation, i think i might have something to show.

I hope i can count with your comments and criticism when i launch it, which i believe, its only a couple of months from now, as i have a great respect for your work and your vision.

You helped to move the needle forward in a domain we need desperately of a solution or else all of our data and freedoms are at stake (not to mention it can even be a better technology than the current cloud-corporate centric vision that are designed to maximize corporations profit and data centralization, where we dont actually own anything, anymore).

So thanks for all of your work, it was really inspiring.

Thats the problem with people beeing forced to game ranking systems in order to advance starting from their childhood.

Of course we want to fight the impermanence, but we should not create a bubble to feel safe inside of it as a virtual environment with rules that doesnt change, just because we miss the peace in the maternal woomb.

The impermanence and uncertainty is a reality, we should not fight in order to avoid it by being alienated of its nature, but to use our science, math and tools after all to understand it, and to navigate better through it.

The XXI century requires a deep change in our philosophical disposition and culture.

Its not just about Google, the corporate culture of Google is a side effect of our culture as anything else that grows inside of it.

But the rigid schemes are a clear sign that it will stop innovating more and more with time as the old startup status-quo defying spirit is completely gone.

Maybe the micro-management is not micro-managing what you think they should be micro-managing?

I mean, thats the problem with vertical schemes and bureocracy.. the guy who is micro-managing is also micro-managed by some sort of results that actually ends not being very pragmatic, end give him good points in this blind objective system who ranks him and the people he manage according to some parameters that in the end they 'game' to look good.

But this is a by-product of their initial motivation.

I mean, how could they know their link times would be that much better?

I know that Pike et al. worked on compilers for Inferno, and the Ken´s C compiler used some tricks to know beforehand they could make it compile and link very fast, but they couldnt know if the language they were designing would be as fast (to compile) as C or Limbo.

They could say confidently: "we could do better", but they would need more pragmatic motives, even to convince Google to support that effort.

And i bet Google was struggling with C++ enginnering, specially within the newcomers on the team.

I think, both things are true, but developer ergonomics play a very important factor into the why of a language and where it fits in the scheme of things.

I dont know the experience of others with this, but in reality is not that easy to have people with enough brain power or compromise for languages like C++ and Rust.

Sure theres "enough for the world", if you sum everybody, but i bet that even a company of the size of Dropbox would have a hard time hiring everyone they need if the complexity of the language is the same as Rust or C++.

For instance, if you read the Go manifesto to why the language was created, you can read between the lines that C++ getting in the way where enginners were fighting hard to deal with language complexity.

So the same way as Java before them, they created a language for the "average programmer". And you can see how the language is very pragmatic and how they fight to no put more complexity on the language.

By the way, i know its a personal opinion, but i think Rust will not be a great fit for the cloud backend exactlya because of this kind of thing. It will be hard to create codebase as complex as the ones in Java, because there will be much less man-hours available.

Maybe if generations are getting smarter, IDK, but needing to rely on a big head-count of C++ or Rust enginners for any company, i bet they will have a hard time to fill all the positions they need.

Theres much more C++ enginners than Rust right now, and companies have a hard time hiring them (and i bet that for Rust it will be no different giving its complexity).