Readit Newsseawlf commented on Phantom – forward-thinking concept of OS that's not Linux-derived phantomos.org/... · Posted by u/shalabhc
A nitpick: don't use the apostrophe in the phrase "in the 1960s". It's not a possessive in that sentence.
See, e.g., https://www.thepunctuationguide.com/apostrophe.html
This is not a hard-and-fast rule. There's hardly agreement in style guides on this note. Don't be a jerk and nitpick style on the internet; it does not add to the conversation.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/13631/is-an-apos...
seawlf commented on Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/... · Posted by u/jamesjue
I took the class this textbook is used for a couple of years ago at UW. Andrea was a fantastic teacher and it was the easiest presentation of the material I'd ever found! Seriously, read this textbook. It's full of wit and information.
seawlf commented on A Mansion Filled with Hidden Worlds: When the Internet Was Young undark.org/article/wilo-e... · Posted by u/anarbadalov
I’ve only heard of Second Life, not tried it, so can I ask: is that scripting capability “online”? I.e. is this more like a multiuser Smalltalk environment (or an SQL server with stored procedures), where the IDE and the REPL and the compiler are all “within” the shared space; or is the toolchain offline, and you just push compiled modules to the server?
LambdaMOO was the former: you were using existing objects to code new objects, by sending the existing objects messages on a live server. (A bit like writing bash scripts on a multitenant Unix server where everyone can drop things into /usr/local/bin, really.)
I feel like there’s a wide-open space in the market right now for a game like Minecraft or Mario Maker where everything is built out of “blocks” with behaviours—but where these block-type behaviours are scripted within the envrionment itself, so you can create and share new “block types” without the need for any meta-VR commands. Like a Steam Workshop service, but one that is intended for players, rather than for game developers. A game with an scientific invention economy.
Yes, the scripting and building is all "online" as you put it. There are essentially no barriers to building, all you have to worry about is the primitive limit.
Very exciting news!
I hope YC will help Chinese startups become global. My biggest problem with Silicon Valley is its ideological uniformity and the increasing willingness to use their companies/products as vehicles to push their ideologies.
China would be in an excellent position to address the part of the Western market that is increasingly alienated by this push. They can build SV tech clones for the local market, and then expand to the global market by offering ideologically more neutral (from Western perspective) alternatives to SV tech.
Chinese startups will have their own flaws, but at least we will have a choice.
>ideologically more neutral
I hardly feel like the global market will accept Chinese alternatives as being "ideologically neutral" in any sense of the phrase.
seawlf commented on 100 days with Rust: a series of brick walls brandur.org/fragments/rus... · Posted by u/another
As someone who has been programming in Rust for nearly a year, even for commercial purposes, this article is baffling to me. I've found the compiler messages to be succinct and helpful. The package system is wonderful. It's dead easy to get something off the ground quickly. All it took was learning how and when to borrow.
The headline is clickbaity. The point isn't that Silicon Valley isn't a major force in tech or that other parts of the US will "beat" it. Rather, it's that you can build valuable tech companies outside of it, and that the Midwest in particular is ripe for more tech companies. I know first hand, I'm building my VC-backed (including coastal $) startup in Madison, and we've stayed put. I realized the pressures we felt to move early on were our own insecurities and the bias of tech/investor media (which I've noticed has changed recently, we're not seen as so crazy!)
I'm glad we stayed put, especially as we've started to focus on real revenue and scaling, and less on trying to be hot for the purposes of raising a big early round. I feel like the market for engineers around here is becoming an advantage for us, and we're not having to fight the same talent wars as those on the coasts. That matters.
Having just moved to SF from Madison, I have to say that the engineering competence of teams there is disappointing in comparison to the Bay Area. Not only that, but Madison companies really do not pay well at all. You can't expect to keep talent if you aren't paying for it.
Great! Maybe in the future it’ll be able to understand, at 10pm, “Alexa wake me up at 7” without asking if I mean “In the morning, or in the evening?”.
Considering the time this has been out and the apparent resources, so much of the basic functionality is locked behind formal command patterns rather than anything natural (and every “new features” email I get seems to just be variants of “tell me a joke/fortune cookie/fact”)
Holy shit, that first one is so annoying. I don't understand how even the shoddiest of voice assistants on the market get it right but Alexa doesn't.
It records your sessions and is configurable with Janet, a Lisp. I'm having a lot of fun with it! (It's also the only thing I ever seem to post about on HN, heh)