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p9idfon GUI vs CLI: Operation vs Expression

Excel vs SQL or awk.

Because Lynx (except for its dump mode) and Pine address characters on the screen in two dimensions, I consider them to be graphical programs. They are just very limited graphics. There is a difference between a program which displays text on the screen and a program which prints its output to stdout.

p9idfon How Structs Really Work in C

"memcpy(&v, video_loc_in_memory, sizeof(struct video_file));

"Well, here's the problem: if padding bytes are involved, you could be entering a world of pain and not even know it. [...] The solution is to use a compiler switch or a #pragma pack to ensure that structs are packed (i.e., no padding applied)."

That's an implementation-defined hack. The correct solution is to explicitly marshal your data between its in-memory format and the required external representation.

p9idfon How to use epoll? A complete example in C

"I have no argument in principle for the idea that you should restructure your whole program's control flow with transparent cooperative scheduling"

Maintaining any kind of long-term state for the functions which the event loop calls can be trickier than it needs to be, since they need to quickly return and can't leave anything on their stack.

p9idfon Rob Pike comments on Ryan Dahl's rant

You wouldn't put those sorts of things in /proc, but that's basically how things work. And since it's a filesystem, you can export your API effortlessly over the network.

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/4/upasfs

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/4/webfs

p9idfon Rob Pike comments on Ryan Dahl's rant

The problem is that he thought the "regular users" referred to people who use the operating system itself rather than your iPad users.

Do your regular iPad users understand Unix, iOS, BeOS, or OS/2? No, they don't. They understand point and click interfaces on top of them. The operating system is irrelevant to people who want to Play Angry birds. Users who can't turn on their printer are irrelevant to a discussion on the merits of one operating system over another. The user interface on top the system and its programs is a separate topic.

p9idfon Rob Pike comments on Ryan Dahl's rant

Plan 9 uses a system called notes in place of Unix signals. It's pretty much the same idea, but instead of sending an integer you can send arbitrary strings by writing to /proc/n/note. Non-trappable messages are sent to /proc/n/ctl.

This is a more flexible system than Unix integer signals, but in practice the extra flexibility isn't often used, as a process can simply mount a ctl file into the namespace or post a pipe in /srv.

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html?man=proc&sect=...

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html?man=srv&sect=3

p9idfon The Little Book on CoffeeScript

You are begging the question. You can't just say that CoffeeScript provides a real choice without explaining what differentiates CoffeeScript from Javascript and makes the choice viable.

p9idfon The Little Book on CoffeeScript

The answers which the question received, in addition to an insult, were that CoffeeScript removes bugs and mis-features, "is a breath of fresh air", and delights programmers by letting "the underlying awesomeness of Javascript shine through." Hardly real answers.

It is perhaps to-the-point, but I don't think it is aggressive to point out that CoffeeScript frequently shows up on the front page of HN. I am guessing that the comments about fanboyism and unfair down votes came as a response to a down vote, so the initial down vote couldn't be justified on those grounds.

As to the original question of the why CoffeeScript is so popular on HN, I too would like to know.

p9idfon “I hate almost all software” — Ryan Dahl

What his rant literally suggested what to "flush boost and glib and autoconf down the toilet and never think of them again" when "the accumulated complexity of our existing systems is greater than the complexity of creating a new one." It is hardly childish to imagine that such a scenario might occur, and you have not argued against his thesis as he stated it.

p9idfon Scheme vs. Commmon Lisp

Why were they all trying to draw conclusions without any hard data? They were guessing based upon the offhand observation that the program "just thrashed." The first step should have been to profile the program.

p9idfon How can C Programs be so Reliable?

"Java prints a stack trace by default to help correct the mistake, a huge step forward from C's generic segfault."

A segfaulting program will dump core, which the programmer can use to get the stack trace. I consider this to be better UI than printing the trace at a likely bewildered user.

p9idfon C++98 Support Costs Extra (or why we should switch to C++11 now)

"How many Mac applications still support OS X 10.2? 10.3? 10.4? Half of the web doesn’t work anymore on KDE 3.5′s Konqueror."

I'm not familiar with the author's product and can't say whether C++11 is the right choice for him, but I wouldn't consider the constant API churn of OS X or the constant web standard and web standard extension churn to be a good argument in favor of anything.

p9idfon Firefox Now Scores 100% on Acid3 Test

Click on the A in Acid3. It will show a dialogue box which will tell you if the animation lagged.

p9idfon Think in Go: Go's alternative to the multiple-inheritance mindset.

As with all of their other products, Google is in the process of breaking the Groups UI by adding useless frames and whitespace. Try this instead:

http://groups.google.com/group/golang-nuts/msg/7030eaf21d3a0...

p9idfon The airship finally takes off - Hybrid Air Vehicles has first civil customer

Militaries commonly use giant, easily-hit vehicles. Aircraft carriers and cargo planes are obvious examples. Militaries find practical use for such vehicles by defending them against attacks.

p9idfon Inferno on Android

What are Google people working on besides Go that is Plan 9-ish?

p9idfon Your problem with Vim is that you don't grok vi

Sure you can. Turn on rio's hold mode.

p9idfon Do all first links on Wikipedia lead to philosophy?

the author doesn't capitalize his sentences. i didn't find it difficult to read and only noticed halfway through the article. supposedly, capitalized sentences are easier to read, so i wonder if i've been conditioned by the internet to find uncapitalized sentences easy to read as well. off-topic, but interesting.

p9idfon Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings. Inquire within.)

State clearly the problem that you are solving. As it is, you're assuming I already know.

p9idfon Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings. Inquire within.)

I make silly knick-knacks by swirling paint around in bottles and I've been thinking about selling them. Will you tell me if you find them attractive, if you would like one, what swirl and color patterns you think would be neat, and what you would consider paying for one?

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_R1dPFGJyk5w/TVBJndoh53I/AAAAAAAAAB... http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_R1dPFGJyk5w/TVBKOp0ly4I/AAAAAAAAAB... (The green one has a really cool wood grain pattern.)

p9idfon Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings. Inquire within.)

This probably isn't the opinion that you're looking for, but I like the look of it. Make the space between posts larger. Your CamelCase clashes with the 90's vibe. A well placed tacky gif wouldn't hurt.

p9idfon 8 grams of thorium could replace gasoline in cars

"Stevens has worked out you’d require a 227kg, 250MW thorium engine in order to power a typical road car."

250MW is around 333,333 horsepower. A 250kW, 333 horsepower, engine seems more likely to me.

p9idfon Why GNU grep is fast

  ; grep --version
  GNU grep 2.5.3
  ; time LANG=C grep asdf < lesms10.txt > /dev/null
  real	0m0.025s
  user	0m0.011s
  sys	0m0.014s
  ; time /usr/local/plan9/bin/grep asdf < lesms10.txt > /dev/null
  real	0m0.082s
  user	0m0.043s
  sys	0m0.013s
  ; time LANG=en_US.UTF-8 grep adsf < lesms10.txt > /dev/null
  real	0m1.209s
  user	0m0.818s
  sys	0m0.018s

Those are the only two grep implementations I have handy. GNU grep 2.6.3 takes the same amount of time searching for 'asdf' in both locales, but searching for '.' is still slow. Thanks for pointing that out.

p9idfon Why GNU grep is fast

The rumor is that Gnu grep does a slow conversion of each input character into a wchar_t. I haven't personally read the code and verified it, but I consider the following sources reliable enough to believe it.

http://9fans.net/archive/?q=%27gnu+grep%27+UTF-8+malloc&...

p9idfon Why GNU grep is fast

Fun fact: Gnu grep is slow at UTF8. Try

  time LANG=C grep asdf < les_misérables.txt > /dev/null

versus

  time LANG=en_US.UTF-8 grep asdf < les_misérables.txt > /dev/null

p9idfon Signs of life from GNU Hurd

Here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_operating_system

p9idfon Signs of life from GNU Hurd

The logic here is that your opinion on the value of the Hurd isn't objective and that there's no accounting for taste. The Hurd authors know the fruits of their labor far better than you do. If they don't consider their effort wasted and are happy with their results, what are you upset about? If programmers like working on things you don't like, that's their own business.

p9idfon Signs of life from GNU Hurd

What do you care what other programmers do with their time? The ideas in Hurd are particularly interesting enough to those who work on it. That alone justifies its continued development.

p9idfon Unix V5, OpenBSD, Plan 9, FreeBSD, and GNU implementations of echo.c

Yes. Gnu cat is slow. http://hnwriteup.blogspot.com/2011/07/gnu-cat-vs-plan-9-cat....

p9idfon Unix V5, OpenBSD, Plan 9, FreeBSD, and GNU implementations of echo.c

Please point out the plentiful opportunities for off-by-one errors in Plan 9's echo.c. If you send me a copy of Plan 9's echo.c using stdio I will run it and benchmark it for you.