Back when I received my BeBox (which is by now in storage in the attic), I was still a student, and switched regularly between BeOS, Solaris and Linux; the BeBox was the best of the devices available to me at that time, and I still have extremely fond memories of it. The intel port of BeOS was great to play with as well, but at that point with my use cases and the demise of Be inc Linux made a much more reliable bet for a daily driver. Pity, as BeOS really was much nicer…

I really should try out Haiku. It might make me even more nostalgic. :)

Well, they’re also private, for-profit companies that legally own and sell the lines. So, there’s another political angle where people might vote against the regulations under theory that government shouldn’t dictate how you run your business or use your property, esp if it cost you money. Under theory of benefiting owners and shareholders, these companies are legal entities specifically created to generate as much profit from those lines as possible. If you don’t like it, build and sell your own lines. That’s what they’d say.

They don’t realize how hard it is to deploy an ISP on a shoe-string budget to areas where existing players already paid off the expensive part of the investment, can undercut you into bankruptcy, and (per people claiming to be ISP founders on Hacker News) will even cut competitors’ lines “accidentally” so their own customers leave them. In the last case, it’s hard to file and win a lawsuit if you just lost all your revenue and opponent has over a billion in the bank. They all just quit.

But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).

I think this is too optimistic. I live in Chicago, the third biggest city in the country and arguably the tech hub of the midwest. In my building I get to choose between AT&T and Comcast. I’m considered lucky: most of my friends in the city get one option, period. If their ISP starts doing anything shady they don’t have an option to switch, because there’s nobody they can switch to.

Net neutrality is being pushed by the media because it “fights discrimination”, and they blame the “fascist, nazi right” for it’s repeal

Nobody says this. It’s being pushed because it prevents large corporations from locking out smaller players. The Internet is a great economic equalizer: I can start a business and put a website up and I’m just as visible and accessible as Microsoft.

We don’t want Microsoft to be able to pay AT&T to slow traffic to my website but not theirs. It breaks the free market by allowing collusion that can’t be easily overcome. It’s like the telephone network; I can’t go run wires to everyone’s house, but I want my customers to be able to call me. I don’t want my competitors to pay AT&T to make it harder to call me than to call them.

But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).

That assumes people have a choice. They very often don’t. Internet service has a massively high barrier to entry, similar to a public utility. Most markets in the United States have at most two providers (both major corporations opposed to net neutrality). Very, very rarely is there a third.

More importantly, there are only five tier-1 networks in the United States. Five. It doesn’t matter how many local ISPs there are; without Net Neutrality, five corporations effectively control what can and can’t be transmitted. If those five decide something should be slowed down or forbidden, there is nothing I can do. Changing to a different provider won’t do a thing.

(And of those five, all of them donate significantly more to one major political party than the other, and the former Associate General Counsel of one of them is currently chairman of the FCC…)

I can’t speak to why open-source advocates are also pushing for net neutrality, because (in my opinion) the government shouldn’t be involved in how much internet costs.

Net neutrality says nothing about how much it costs. It just says you can’t charge different amounts based on content. It would be like television stations charging more money to Republican candidates to run ads than to Democratic candidates. They’re free to charge whatever they want; they’re not free to charge different people different amounts based on the content of the message.

Democracy requires communication. It does no good to say “freedom!” if the major corporations can effectively silence whoever they want. “At least it’s not the government” is not a good defense of stifling public debate.

And there’s a difference between a newspaper and a television/radio station/internet service. I can buy a printing press and make a newspaper and refuse to carry whatever I want. There are no practical limits to the number of printing presses in the country.

There is a limited electromagnetic spectrum. Not just anyone can broadcast a TV signal. There is a limit to how many cables can be run on utility polls or buried underground. Therefore, discourse carried over those media are required to operate more in the public trust than others. As they become more essential to a healthy democracy, that only becomes more important. It’s silly to say “you still have freedom of speech” if you’re blocked from television, radio, the Internet, and so on. Those are the public forums of our day. That a corporation is doing the blocking doesn’t make it any better than if the government were to do it.

Side note, the reason you don’t see the protests against the “gatekeepers” is that most of the mainstream media isn’t accurately covering the reaction of the people to the censorship.

There’s a big difference between Twitter not wanting to carry Alex Jones and net neutrality. Jones is still free to go start up a website that carries his message; with Net Neutrality not only could he be blocked from Twitter, but the network itself could make his website inaccessible.

There is no alternative with Net Neutrality. You can’t build your own Internet. Without mandating equal treatment of traffic, we hand the Internet over solely to the big players. Preventing monopolistic and oligarchic control of public discourse is a valid use of government power. It’s not censorship, it’s the exact opposite.

Even though I’m favoring net neutrality, I appreciate you braving the conservative position on this here on Lobsters. I did listen to a lot of them. What I found is most had reasonable arguments but had no idea about what ISP’s did, are doing, are themselves paying Tier 1’s, etc. Their media sources’ bias (all have bias) favoring ISP’s for some reason didn’t tell them any of it. So, even if they’d have agreed with us (maybe, maybe not), they’d have never reached those conclusions since they were missing crucial information to reflect on when choosing to regulate or not regulate.

An example is one telling me companies like Netflix should pay more to Comcast per GB or whatever since they used more. The guy didn’t know Comcast refuses to do that when paying Tier 1’s negotiating transit agreements instead that worked entirely different. He didn’t know AT&T refused to give telephones or data lines to rural areas even if they were willing to pay what others did. He didn’t know they could roll out gigabit today for same prices but intentionally kept his service slow to increase profit knowing he couldn’t switch for speed. He wasn’t aware of most of the abuses they were doing. He still stayed with his position since that guy in particular went heavily with his favorite, media folks. However, he didn’t like any of that stuff which his outlets never even told him about. Even if he disagrees, I think he should disagree based on an informed decision if possible since there’s plenty smart conservatives out there who might even favor net neutrality if no better alternative. I gave him a chance to do that.

So, I’m going to give you this comment by @lorddimwit quickly showing how they ignored the demand to maximize profit, this comment by @dotmacro showing some abuses they do with their market control, and this article that gives nice history of what free market did with each communications medium with the damage that resulted. Also note that the Internet itself was an open, free-if-you-have-a-wire system that competed with the proprietary, charge-per-use, lock-them-in-forever-if-possible systems the private sector was offering. It smashed them so hard you might have even never heard of them or forgotten a lot about them depending on your age. It also democratized more goods than about anything other than maybe transportation. Probably should stick with the principles that made that happen to keep innovation rolling. Net neutrality was one of them that was practiced informally at first then put into law as the private sector got too much power and was abusing it. We should keep doing what worked instead of the practices ISP’s want that didn’t work but will increase their profits at our expense for nothing in return. That is what they want: give us less or as little improvement in every way over time while charging us more. It’s what they’re already doing.

But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).

What obvious reasons? Because customers will switch providers if they don’t treat all traffic equally? That would require (a) users are able to tell if a provider prioritizes certain traffic, and (b) that there is a viable alternative to switch to. I have no confidence in either.

But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).

Most customers have exceedingly limited options in their area, and they’re not going to switch houses because of their ISP. Especially in apartment complexes, you see cases where, say, Comcast has the lockdown on an entire population and there really isn’t a reasonable alternative.

In a truly free market, maybe I’d agree with you, but the regulatory environment and natural monopolistic characteristics of telecomm just don’t support the case.

But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).

Awkward political jabs aside, most of your statements imply that you believe customers are free to choose who they get their internet from, which is just plain incorrect. Whatever arguments you want to make against net neutrality, there is one indisputable fact that you cannot just ignore or paper over:

ISPs do not operate in a free market.

In the vast majority of the US, cable and telephone companies are granted local monopolies in the areas they operate. That is why they must be regulated. As the Mozilla blog said, they have both the incentive and means to abuse their customers and they’ve already been caught doing it on multiple occasions.

All of that is gibberish. Net Neutrality is being pushed because it creates a more competitive marketplace. None of it has anything to do with professional liar Alex Jones.

But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).

That’ s not how markets work. And it’s not how the technology or permit process for ISPs work. There is very little competition among ISPs in the US market.

Hey, here’s a great example from HN of the crap they pull without net neutrality. They advertised “unlimited,” throttled it secretly, admitted it, and forced them to pay extra to get actual unlimited.

@lorddimwit add this to your collection. Throttling and fake unlimited been going on long time but they couldve got people killed doing it to first responders. Id have not seen that coming just for PR reasons or avoiding local, govt regulation if nothing else.

I can’t speak to why open-source advocates are also pushing for net neutrality, because (in my opinion) the government shouldn’t be involved in how much internet costs.

It’s not about how much internet costs, it’s about protecting freedom of access to information, and blocking things like zero-rated traffic that encourage monopolies and discourage competition. If I pay for a certain amount of traffic, ISPs shouldn’t be allowed to turn to Google and say “want me to prioritize YouTube traffic over Netflix traffic? Pay me!”

Net neutrality is being pushed by the media because it “fights discrimination”, and they blame the “fascist, nazi right” for it’s repeal (and they’re correct, except for the “fascist, nazi” bit).

Where on earth did you hear that? I sure hope you’re not making it up—you’ll find this site doesn’t take too kindly to that.

For alternative OSs, the best thing to do is implement VNC. Through VNC you can access OSs that specialize in accessing the web, such as Windows, Linux, and … Chrom/iumOS. ChromiumOS is probably the best since it’s sole purpose is to interact with the omnipresent OS that is the web.

Eventually I will figure out some easy setup to do this.

The encrypted block device support still exists as a third-party package (though it’s maintained by one of the core kernel developers); it just does not support having the boot device be block-encrypted.

I have Factor running in production. Although I don’t really maintain the web app much - it just ticks along - Factor runs tinyvid.tv and has for the past few years. I originally wrote it to test HTML 5 video implementations in browsers back when I worked on the Firefox implementation of video.

As always, it depends on what you’re doing—I’d definitely be nervous if you told me you were shoving Factor into an automobile, for example—but Factor the VM and Factor the language are both quite stable and reliable. On top of doublec’s comment, the main Factor website runs Factor (and its code is distributed as part of Factor itself for your perusal), and it’s been quite stable. (We do occasionally have to log in and kick either Factor or nginx, but it’s more common that the box needs to be rebooted for kernel updates.) I likewise ran most of my own stuff on Factor for a very long time, including some…maybe not mission-critical, but mission-important internal tooling at Fog Creek. And finally, we know others in the community who are building real-world things with Factor, including a backup/mirroring tool which I believe is being written for commercial sale.

The two main pain-points I tend to hit when using Factor in prod are that I need a vocabulary no one has written, or that I need to take an existing vocabulary in a new direction and have to fix/extend it myself. Examples are our previous lack of libsodium bindings (since added by another contributor) and our ORM lacking foreign key support (not a huge deal, just annoying). Both of these classes of issues are increasingly rare, but if you live in a world where everything’s just a dependency away, you’ll need to be ready for a bit of a change.

You can take a look at our current vocab list if you’re curious whether either of the above issues would impact anything in particular you have in mind.

My non-breezy answer is “anything you enjoy using it for.” There are vocabularies for all kinds of things, ranging from 3D sound to web servers to building GUIs to command-line scripts to encryption libraries to dozens of other things. Most of those were written because people were trying to do something that needed a library, so they wrote one. I think the breadth of subjects covered speaks well to the flexibility of the language.

That all said, there are two main areas where I think Factor really excels. The first is when I’m not really sure how to approach something. Factor’s interactive development environment is right up there with Smalltalk and the better Common Lisps, so it’s absolutely wonderful for exploring systems, poking around, and iterating on various approaches until you find one that actually seems to fit the problem domain. In that capacity, I frequently use it for reverse-engineering/working with binary data streams, exploring web APIs, playing with new data structures/exploring what high-level design seems likely to yield good real-world performance, and so on.

The second area I think Factor excels is DSLs. Factor’s syntax is almost ridiculously flexible, to the point that we’ve chatted on and off about making the syntax extension points a bit more uniform. (I believe this branch is the current experimental dive in that direction.) But that flexibility means that you can trivially extend the language to handle whatever you need to. Two silly/extreme examples of that would be Smalltalk and our deprecated alternative Lisp syntax (both done as libraries!), but two real examples would be regular expressions, which are done as just a normal library, despite having full syntax support, or strongly typed Factor, which again is done at the library level, not the language level. I have some code lying around somewhere where I needed to draft up an elaborate state machine, and I quickly realized the best path forward was to write a little DSL so I could just describe the state machine directly. So that’s exactly what I did. Lisps can do that, but few other languages can.

The threads are still green threads, if that’s what you’re asking, but we’ve got a really solid IPC story (around mailboxes, pattern matching, Erlang-style message passing, etc.), so it’s not a big deal to fire up a VM per meaningful parallel task and kick objects back and forth when you genuinely need to.

In terms of future directions, I don’t know we’ve got anything concrete. What I’d like to do is to make sure the VM is reentrant, allow launching multiple VMs in the same address space, and then make the IPC style more efficient. That’d make it a lot easier to keep multithreaded code safe while allowing real use of multiple cores. But that’s just an idea right now; we’ve not done anything concrete that direction, as far as I know.

Really off-topic, but isn’t Slava at Apple?

This talk touches on this issue, along with some related ones and HCI in general: Bret Victor: The Future of Programming

Text is great when (not if) your more complicated tools fail or do something you can’t tolerate and you need to use tools which don’t Respect The Intent of designers who, for whatever reason, don’t respect your intent or workflow. Sometimes, solving a problem means working around a breakage, whether or not that breakage is intentional on someone else’s part.

Besides, we just (like, last fifteen or so years) got text to the point where it’s largely compatible. Would be a shame to throw that away in favor of some new AST-database-thing which only exists on a few platforms.

This, this, a thousand times this. Text is a good user-interface for code (for now). But it’s a terrible storage and interchange format. Every tool needs its own parser, and each one is slightly different, leaving begging the amount of cpu and programmer time we waste going from text<->ast<->text.

Smalltalk. The word you’re looking for is Smalltalk. ;)

You can’t convert to elastic-tabstop style from that, and without heavy language-grammar knowledge you can’t do this for 4-space “tabs” generally.

Every editor ever supports this for traditional indent style, though: http://intellindent.info/seriously/

That’s not the OS’s decision to make, though. With the OOM killer enabled, C/C++ doesn’t have the option to handle it differently. If Rust or Go ever wants to change how they handle allocation failure in the future, they can’t if the OOM killer is enabled. It’s too strong of a policy decision for such low-level features as allocation and process lifetime.

(Of course, I haven’t written a kernel used by billions, so it’s easy for me to judge.)

If there were capacity planning done and limits set on processes or process groups, the ones violating their own capacity would be the ones degraded.

The three things that kept me from going Haiku as a real desktop the last time I looked were a lack of drivers, general instability, and a lack of a good modern web browser. Have any of those been addressed? I don’t honestly need VMs or video conferencing, but being on a super old version of Firefox or WebKit were definite blockers.

I’ll happily eat my words! But i think it’s unlikely, as they are aiming at a target 15 years old!

HN and Reddit can be pretty toxic, it might just be that the author doesn’t want to deal with that.

Two other explanations based on previous comments people made on HN after their stuff hit front page:

1. They dont want a work in progress to be seen by that large a crowd of technical and business people yet. A lot of negatives can come from it.

2. They don’t want their site taken down by the HN Hug of Death. As HN reads it, nobody else can unless they think to hit Wayback. I dont recall if it happens to Medium articles.

It’s not even that they’re useful, it’s that they’re not optional. I’m bothered by the preinstalled stuff on Macs too, and the fact that you have to link your online accounts deeply into the OS.

I basically am a “window manager and something to intelligently open files by type kinda guy.” Anything more than that I’m not gonna use and thus it bothers me. I’m a minimalist.

It works on Home.

The tricky parts of regex don’t go away with verbalising the operators.

For example: is the statement above evaluated in a greedy or non-greedy fashion?

Excellent point. Giving names and recursive ability to regexes gets you Parsing Expression Grammars, though there’s no standardized notation for them.

Once you can name subexpressions you have the question of recursion. If you support recursion this is essentially PEG. That’s why I call PEG “regex++”.

And ignores the fact that not everyone has “correct” vision and color perception.

The idea that there will be a correct colour scheme for a text editor is an amazing mix of arrogance

Why?

I have my own opinions on the matter, but it seems to me that optimising a colour scheme for a set of requirements (contrast, colour blindness, long exposure time, etc) is probably possible.

I think most people have a brand preference for a set of colours that is something else though.

and over-simplification.

The depth of the response may be lost to us, but surely it is irresponsible to assume it was done without thought given here is an accomplished programmers report that the response was in fact, quite thoughtful?