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I wonder how using a combination of entr(1) and stack repl would feel? Or is spawning ghci too heavy to do it over and over again.
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I dont post often, but I did redo my website recently and posted it here a few days ago.
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“A practical and portable Scheme system”
From the website
(The post and the linked email didn’t give me any idea what Chicken was.)
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The way I remember it is it’s the Scheme that compiles to C for speed and portability. silentbicycle posted this interview with the author. aminb added someone’s blog posts on interesting work.
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Nice work, and the tool looks nice !
I really like the simpleness of your website, making it awesome to browse, with no clutter. Just what’s required.
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Not using an external set of libraries to build your ui does not mean your internal abstractions do not form their own unique framework..
But good for them!
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Visiting the parents this week, coming back home on sunday.
I’ve been doing a bit of work on their house / yard every day, they want to fill a hole next to the pool so I’m slowly digging an area they want to equalise and transferring it into a hole. I also replaced some rotting wood supporting a flight of outdoor stairs. This weekend we’ll be cutting down a few dying trees.
Tech wise, I’m rebuilding my website, it should be ready by the end of today, and it’s going to be a great improvement over the current one. Just need to write a post describing my setup, deploy it and setup backups with tarsnap.
Brian Callahan is hosting an openbsd ports workshop stream tomorrow, I’d like to catch that as earlier this week I compiled ats on openbsd and would like to port it. I also want to send a runBSD story to Roman Zolotarev
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Interesting that it supports the plumber as well. Other acme clones / descendants dont always interoperate well with it.
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The author mentions a few languages toward the end, but forgets one of my favourite languages: http://www.ats-lang.org/
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friendlysock
1 month ago
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ARM kills off its anti RISC-V riscv-basics.com site after own staff revolt
a chipmonger kills its webshit propogands after some employees complain
If you can easily n-gate a submission, maybe it shouldn’t be here.
Spam about ad campaigns and counterreactions is not a core value prop of lobsters. :(
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on the other hand, this story is currently on the front page with an above-median vote score, and the other riscv-basics story is the highest voted story currently on the front page, so evidently the users of lobsters found both relevant to their interests.
Yours is some low-quality gatekeeping.
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News is the mindkiller. Humans are hardwired to be really interested in new things regardless of their utility, usefulness, or healthiness–you need look no further than the 24 hour news cycle or tabloids or HN front page to observe this phenomena.
If you look at any given submission, it has a bunch of different things it’s “good” at: good in terms of educating about hardware, good in terms of talking about the math behind some compiler optimization, good in whatever. Submissions that are news are good primarily in terms of how new they are, and have other goodness that tangential if it exists at all. The articles may even have a significant off-topic component, such as politics or gossip or advertising.
This results in the following pathologies:
- Over time, if a community optimizes for news, they start to normalize those other components, until the scope of the submissions expands to encompass the formerly off-topic material…and that material is usually something that is at best duplicated elsewhere and at worst pure flamebait.
- The industry we’re in specializes in spending loads of money on attractive clickbait and advertising presenting as news, and so soon the submissions become flooded with low-quality crap or advertising that takes up community cycles to process without ever giving anything substantial in return.
- The perceived quality of the site goes down for everybody and the community fragments, because news is available elsewhere (thus, the utility of the site is diminished) and because the valuable discussion is taken up with nitpicking news stories. This is why, say, c2 wiki is still around and useful and a lot of news sites…aren’t.
What you dismiss as gatekeeping is an attempt to combat this.
EDIT:
A brief note–your example of the two ARM articles being on the front page illustrate the issue. Otherwise intelligent lobsters will upvote that sort of stuff because it’s “neat”, without noting that with everybody behaving that way we’ve temporarily lost two good spots for technical content–instead, we have more free advertising for ARM (all press is good press) and now slightly more precedent for garbage submissions and call-response (news thing, rebuttal to news thing, criticism/analysis of rebuttal). It’s all so tiresome.
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I bookmarked and often shared this post since it seemed like a nice set of guidelines. Had a lot of votes in favor, too.
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Haha. Depends on the context. They’re important for meta threads since it can determine site’s future.
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This is interesting news, it’s not just drama or clickbait. The big chip makers have maintained an oligopoly through patents on abstract math: an ISA. It’s insane that innovation can only come from a few big players because of their lawyers. RISC-V is the first serious dent that the open source movement has been able to make in this market because (unlike ARM, OpenPOWER, and OpenSPARC) it has a serious commitment to open source and it is technologically superior.
ARM will be the first player to fall to RISC-V because they have a monopoly on lower end chips. Samsung, Qualcomm, NVidia, Apple, Google, etc. are all perfectly capable of making a competitive chips without having to pay a 1% tax to ARM. We are already seeing this with Western Digital’s switch to RISC-V, there is no advantage to paying ARM for simple micro-controllers … which is a huge portion of ARM’s business.
That they are resorting to FUD tactics shows that ARM execs know this. People interested in the larger strategic moves, like myself, find this article about how their FUD tactics backfired very interesting. I would appreciate it if you didn’t characterize this sort of news as spam and the people who follow how big industry players are behaving as just being into drama.
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With respect, a good deal of your post is kremlinology.
That they are resorting to FUD tactics shows that ARM execs know this.
The ARM execs cannot be guaranteed to “know” anything of the sort–it’s more likely that there is a standard playbook to be run to talk about any competing technology, RISC-V, OSS, or otherwise. Claiming that “oh ho obviously they feel the heat!” is speculation, and without links and evidence, baseless speculation at that.
the people who follow how big industry players are behaving as just being into drama.
The people who “follow” big industry players are quite usually just people that want to feel informed, and are quite unlikely to be anybody with any actual actions available given this information. Thus, just because something is interesting to them doesn’t make it necessarily useful or actionable.
characterize this sort of news as spam
Again, all news is spam on a site with historically more of a bend towards information and non-news submissions. Further, it’s not like this hasn’t been covered extensively elsewhere, on Slashdot and HN and Gizmodo and elsewhere. It’s not like it isn’t being shown on many fronts.
Please understand that while in this specific case, you might have an interest–but if all lobsters follow this idea, it trashes the site.
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With respect, a good deal of your post is kremlinology.
I’m not allowed to infer basic information about the internal state of an organization based on its public actions?
That they are resorting to FUD tactics shows that ARM execs know this.
The ARM execs cannot be guaranteed to “know” anything of the sort–it’s more likely that there is a standard playbook to be run to talk about any competing technology, RISC-V, OSS, or otherwise. Claiming that “oh ho obviously they feel the heat!” is speculation, and without links and evidence, baseless speculation at that.
Do you understand why I might feel frustrated when someone mocks arguments defending a topic but then demands others provide extensive context to the conversation s/he inserted themselves into?
It’s not like ARM hasn’t spoken out on this subject before; a high level ARM technology fellow debated RISC-V foundation members a couple of years ago. The debate sounds a lot like an early draft of the arguments presented on the FUD website: RISC-V can’t possibly replicate ARM’s ecosystem and design services.
If you go look at the RISC-V foundation membership list, you will find a lot of ARM licensors and competitors including Qualcomm, Samsung, NVidia, IBM, Huawei, and Google. They are using RISC-V as a vehicle to jointly fund high-quality replacements of ARM’s IP, much of which consists of ISA patents and tooling. RISC-V has a very thorough patent review process, making it difficult to sue RISC-V manufacturers based on the ISA. There is a lot I don’t understand about the value ARM adds in terms of chip design and industry collaborations, but NVidia alone is worth 3x what SoftBank paid for ARM just two years ago.
If ARM execs aren’t worried about RISC-V taking market share, they should be. ARM creating a FUD website is very strong, direct evidence that this is the case.
The people who “follow” big industry players are quite usually just people that want to feel informed, and are quite unlikely to be anybody with any actual actions available given this information. Thus, just because something is interesting to them doesn’t make it necessarily useful or actionable.
It feels like you are talking down to me and other interested readers. Are kernel hackers the only people allowed to be interested in kernel development news? I don’t get a lot of actionable information based on the latest scheduler drama, but (as a UX engineer) I am interested in the outcome of these debates.
I came to Lobste.rs for a deeper understanding of the underlying technical and political factors at play here.
Again, all news is spam on a site with historically more of a bend towards information and non-news submissions.
I am open to this argument and I probably wouldn’t have perceived your comments so negatively had I not started from the standard definition of spam. Of course, I also understand that it is hard to justify the time to fit such nuance into a comment on an article : )
You clearly have thought a lot about this and discussed it with others, but new and causal readers haven’t. Perhaps you could use less incendiary language? Just say that Lobste.rs focuses on non-news submissions and that you feel industry news is offtopic.
Further, it’s not like this hasn’t been covered extensively elsewhere, on Slashdot and HN and Gizmodo and elsewhere. It’s not like it isn’t being shown on many fronts.
The technical analysis on HN and other sites is … non-existent. I would love to hear more from experts with informed opinions on chip design and manufacture and that’s what I expected of the comments here.
Please understand that while in this specific case, you might have an interest–but if all lobsters follow this idea, it trashes the site.
Well, I’m kinda peeved that the comments section of both stories turned into a slow-burn flamewar : /
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ARM will be the first player to fall to RISC-V because they have a monopoly on lower end chips.
They actually don’t. A good chunk of the chip market is 8-16 bitters. Billions of dollars worth. In the 32-bit category, there’s a lot of players licensing IP and selling chips. ARM has stuff from low end all the way up to smartphones with piles of proven I.P. plus great brand, ecosystem, and market share. They’re not going anywhere any time soon. MIPS is still selling lots of stuff in low-end devices including 32-bit versions of MCU’s. Cavium used them for Octeon I-III’s for high-performance networking with offload engines.
With most of these, you’d get working hardware, all the peripherals you need, toolchain, books/training on it, lots of existing libraries/code, big company to support you, and maybe someone to sue if the I.P. didn’t work. RISC-V doesn’t have all that yet. Most big companies who aren’t backers… which are most big companies in this space… won’t use it without a larger subset of that or all of that depending on company. I’m keeping hopes up for SiFi’s new I.P. but even it probably has to be licensed for big money. If paying an arm and a leg, many will choose to pay the company known to deliver.
From what I see, ARM’s marketing people or whatever are just reacting to a new development that’s in the news a lot. There some threat to their revenues given some big companies are showing interest in RISC-V. So, they’re slamming the competition and protecting their own brand. Just business news or ops as usual.
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ARM will be the first
player[large monopoly] tofall[lose lots of market-share] to RISC-V because they have a monopoly on lower end chips.Argh, I thought “fall” was too strong a choice of words while writing this, I should’ve listened to myself.
My line of thought was that it’s really hard to create a competitive server platform, as evidenced by the niche market SPARC, OpenPOWER, and ARM occupy in the server space. However, there are plenty of low-power, low-complexity ARM cores out there that are up for grabs. I’m hoping that Samsung, Qualcomm, and other RISC-V backers are supporting RISC-V in hopes that they can take their CPU designs in-house and cut ARM out of the equation.
I am largely ignorant of the (actual) lower-end chip market, thanks for the insight.
With most of these, you’d get working hardware, all the peripherals you need, toolchain, books/training on it, lots of existing libraries/code, big company to support you, and maybe someone to sue if the I.P. didn’t work. RISC-V doesn’t have all that yet.
The RISC-V foundation was very intentional in their licensing and wanted to ensure that designers and manufactures would have plenty of secret sauce they could layer on top of the core spec. This is one of the reasons OpenSPARC failed and why so many different frenemies are collaborating on RISC-V.
From what I see, ARM’s marketing people or whatever are just reacting to a new development that’s in the news a lot.
Their marketing people made the site, but an ARM technology fellow pitched similarly bad arguments in a debate ~2 years ago. Or maybe I’ve just drunk too much Kool Aid.
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I upvoted both submissions. I consciously bought Lobsters frontpage spot for RISC-V advertising and paid loss of technical content in exchange. I acknowlege other negative externalities but I think they are small. Sorry about that.
I think RISC-V advertising is as legitimate as BSD advertising, Rust advertising, etc. here. Yes, technical advertising would have been better. I have a small suspicion of gatekeeping RISC-V (or hardware) against established topics, which you can dismiss by simply stating so in the reply.
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Thanks for keeping up the effort to steer the submissions in a more cerebral direction, away from news. I totally agree with you and appreciate it.
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I almost never upvote these kind of submissions, but seeing as it can be hard to get these off the main page, maybe it could be interesting for lobsters to have some kind of merging feature that could group stories that are simply different stages of the same news into the same story, thus only blocking one spot.
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Now that is interesting. It could be some sort of chaining or hyperlinks that goes in the text field. If not done manually, the system could add it automatically in a way that was clearly attributed to the system. I say the text field so the actions next to stories or comments stay uncluttered.
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It would also allow it to act as a timeline of sorts. Done correctly I could even apply quasi automatically to tech release posts as well, making it easier to read prior discussions.
The main question right now would be how to handle the comments ui for those grouped stories.
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All publicity is good publicity is actually totally false.The actual saying should be something like “Not all bad publicity is bad for you if it aligns with your identity.”. Fighting OSS definitely doesn’t align with the ARM identity/ethos.
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It’s so easy to just react and click that upvote button without thinking; the score is a reflection of emotional appeal, not of this submission’s relevance. “But it’s on the front page” is also a tired argument that comes up in every discussion like this one. @friendlysock makes excellent points in his reply to you, I totally agree with him and appreciate that he takes the time to try to steer the submissions away from news. There are plenty of news sites, I don’t want another one.
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or maybe n-gate is a worthless sneer masquerading as a website that doesn’t need to be used as a referent on topical material? Especially given that literally anything posted to HN is going to be skewered there? I’m not the go-to guy on HN cheerleading (at all, in any way) but n-gate is smirky petulant crap and doesn’t exactly contribute to enlightenment on tech topics.
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worthless sneer masquerading as a website that doesn’t need to be used as a referent on topical material
El Reg could be described the exact same way!
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thats…..actually a good point.
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voronoipotato
1 month ago
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We shouldn't let people get used to the idea that software fails
Software correctness is not a developer decision, it’s largely a business decision guided by cost management. I mean depending on where you work and what you work on the software may be so stable that when you try to point out a problem the business will simply point out that the software is correct because it’s always correct and that you’re probably just not understanding why it is correct. Apps are buggy mostly when the costs of failure to the business are low or not felt by management.
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Came here to say exactly this.
There is no barrier to entry or minimum bar for consideration in software.
So you end up with thousands of businesses saying variations of “our budget is $1000 and we want you to make a software that …”.
Then of course you are going to see lots of failure in the resulting software.
The choice often ends up being “spend 10,000x and make it super robust” or “live with bugs”.
No business chooses the first option when you can say “oops sorry that was a bug we just fixed it. thank you! :)”.
This pattern persists even as the cost of developing software comes down. Meaning if you reduce the cost of producing flawless software to $X the market will choose a much more buggy version that costs a fraction of $X because the cost of living with those bugs is still much lower than the cost of choosing a flawless one.
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I recently moved to financial software development, and it seems everybody has real life experience of losing huge sums of money to a bug, and everybody, including management and trading, is willing to try practice to reduce bugs. So I became more convinced that it is the cost of bugs that matters.
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Not really.
Would you like your mobile phone screen to be made bullet proof and have it cost $150M?
Would you like an atomic bedside alarm clock for $500k?
A light bulb that is guaranteed to not fail for 200 years for $1,000?
It’s a real trade-off and there’s a line to be drawn about how good/robust/reliable/correct/secure you want something to be.
Most people/businesses can live with software with bugs and the cost of aiming for no bugs goes up real fast.
Taking serious steps towards improving software quality is very time consuming and expensive so even those basic first steps wont be taken unless it’s for something critical such as aircraft or rocket code.
For non-critical software often there’s no huge difference between 0 bugs or 5 bugs or 20 bugs. So there isn’t a strong incentive to try so hard to reduce the bugs from their initial 100 to 10 (and to keep it there).
The case that compels us to eliminate bugs is where it is something to the effect of “no bugs or the rocket crashes”.
Also you have to consider velocity of change/iteration in that software. You can spend tons of resources and have your little web app audited and certified ast it is today but you have to think of something for your future changes and additions too.
As the technology improves the average software should become better in the same way that the average pair of shoes or the average watch or the average tshirt becomes better.
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Would you like your mobile phone screen to be made bullet proof and have it cost $150M?
Quite exaggerated, but I get your point. The thing is — yes, I personally would like to pay 2-3x for a phone if I can be SURE it won’t degrade software-wise. I’m not worried about hardware (as long as the battery is replaceable), but I know that in 2-3 major OS updates it will feel unnecessarily slow and clunky.
Also you have to consider velocity of change/iteration in that software
Oh, man, that’s whole other story… I can’t remember the last time I wanted software to update. And the only two reasons I do update usually are:
- It annoys me until I do;
- It will hopefully fix some bugs introduced due to this whole crazy update schedule in the first place.
Most people/businesses can live with software with bugs and the cost of aiming for no bugs goes up real fast.
Which brings us back to my original point: we got used to it and we don’t create any significant pressure.
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Businesses that allow buggy code to ship should probably be shamed into better behavior. They exist because the bar is low, and would cease to exist with a higher bar. Driving them out of business would be generally desirable.
A boycott would need to start or be organized by developers, since developers are the only people who know the difference between a circumstance where a high-quality solution is possible but difficult, a circumstance where a high-quality solution is trivial but rare for historical reasons, and a situation where all solutions are necessarily going to run up against real, mathematical restrictions.
(Also, most code in existence isn’t being developed in a capitalist-corporate context, and the most important code – code used by everybody – isn’t being developed in that context either. We can and should expect high quality from it, because there’s no point at which improving quality becomes “more than my job’s worth”.)
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it’s largely a business decision guided by cost management.
I don’t agree about the cost management reasoning. Rather it is a business decision that follows what customers actually want. And customers actually do prefer features over quality. No matter how much it hurts our pride in craftsmanship…
The reason we didn’t see it before software is that other fields simply don’t have this trade off as an option: buildings and cars can’t constantly grow new physical features.
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Speed / Quality / Cost
Pick two
You can add on features to cars, and buildings, and the development process does sometimes go on and on forever. The difference is if your cow clicker game has a game breaking bug, typically nobody literally dies. There exists software where people do die if there are serious bugs and in those scenarios they either compromise in speed or cost.
We’ve seen this before software in other fields, and they do have this trade off as an option, you just weren’t in charge of building it. The iron triangle predates software though I do agree scope creep is a bigger problem in software it is also present in other industries.
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It’s not business or management who made us build seemingly infinite layers and abstractions.
Oh it definitely was. The waterfall process, banking on IBM/COBOL/RPG, CORBA, endless piles of objects everywhere, big company apps using obfuscated formats/protocols, Java/.NET… these were middle managers and consultants forcing bullshit on developers. Those bandwagons are still going strong. Most developers stuck on them move slower as a result. The management solution is more bullshit that looked good in a PowerPoint or sounded convincing in a strip club with costs covered by a salesperson. The developers had hardly any say in it at all.
With that status quo, we typically are forced to go with two options: build the new thing on top of or within their pile of bullshit; find new niches or application areas that let us clean slate stuff. Then, we have to sell them on these whether internally or externally. Doing that for stuff that’s quality-focused rather than feature/buzzword-focused is always an uphill battle. So, quality-focused software with simple UI’s aren’t the norm. Although developers and suppliers cause problems, vast majority of status quo is from demand side of consumers and businesses.
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It isn’t? Most managers I’ve met come and see me saying, we dont want to have to think about this, so build on top of this abstraction of it. They definitely do not want us wiping the slate clean and spending a lot of time rebuilding it anew, that would be bad for business.
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Just got internet hooked up to my new appartment!
So $work wise I’m looking for a new one, I have a dedicated office in my new home which will be very pleasant to use (once it’s clean), so I’d like to find some remote work. I’d like to do stuff that’s not web related, but I’m not going to push away web backend jobs if they come my way.
I’m also taking care of my parent’s dog for the week, as they’re off on vacation, playing around with my personal server and cleaning the appartment.
Towards the weekend I’ll be helping out at the Laval beer festival, if any of you are around the montreal region do come around, it’s going to be a blast.
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From what I understood, it was started in JS but was more about testing out various prototypes and c++ was pretty quickly abandoned in favor of rust when he switched from javascript. The devblog has very detailed explanations of his process: http://cityboundsim.com/devblog
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Just in case anybody is still unenlightened by Ed
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I’ve got that book. It’s an excellent supplement to the manual page.
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Moving into a new apartment tomorrow, helping a friend move on sunday.
Though I forgot to rent a truck and now everything is booked… I did find something, but it’s going to cost me.
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I’m moving tomorrow too. Spent the past month packing so I’m not stressed for it. Going to feel like 45C in Montreal. At least it will not be on July 1st when the whole world is moving and feels like 48C.
Good luck to you!
I found this funny so I’d like to mention it: boxes are storage of spacetime. You pack things in the present, you have stored that time (saved it) in the future. It also takes up space. Thus, a box is a spacetime storage medium :D
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lsub has been doing quite interesting research in extending the UI from the line of plan 9. There is plan B, Olive, Clive.
Honesty questions: When are they going to make these research product usable? Do they plan to ship? What does it take for the masses to adopt such OS/UI?
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All it takes is for somebody to turn them into an actual tool, I mean the plan 9 user space stuff is already very usable, though I’ve never used the lsub stuff. The source code is available: http://lsub.org/ls/projects.html
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Hmm. Is this related to bsdcan?
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Yep, video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E873DaCLN4
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Full video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaQpvXSa4X8
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Yes, Theo gave an impromptu talk where he expressed frustration at rumors of openbsd being untrustworthy and then speculated on possible future intel problems. Screaming happened. But now it seems he was right.
Though the bigger issue of embargo’s and their value remains.
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I wish people would stop saying he gave a talk / presentation because that’s not what it was. This was a BOF session. It is a group discussion about a predefined topic and Theo was the BOF organizer. This is why he was talking to the crowd and asking questions. It wasn’t to attack anyone or inflame the situation; it was entirely within the spirit of the BOF.
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Sent the author a message because this now 404s when you click it.
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Hardware I couldn’t get working in Linux just works on a first try with OpenBSD.
To be fair, this is more of an exception than a rule… I for my part always had something missing or incomplete holding me back from really being able to use OpenBSD on a desktop comfortably. Servers are of course an entirely different question. But giving a wrong impression like this one here, could end up deterring people who are interested, but insecure.
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I also thought hardware support was a known advantage of Linux due to its larger ecosystem, both in individual and corporate contributors. My impression was that OpenBSD would support less hardware but the drivers would be higher quality.
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That makes more sense.
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my experience has been the opposite - I’ve found that the hardware I’ve tried mostly works out of the box for me with OpenBSD - where as Linux has often been a complete pain, especially with older hardware.
I’ve had an X41 since new and it ran OpenBSD from day 1 - it initially dual-booted with windows. Some information can be found on my X41 page - you can see it’s old as it talks about configuring BlueTooth on my X41…
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Same story for me. I’ve tried OpenBSD on a bunch of old-ish ThinkPads in the past and have had mixed experiences with hardware support. While a lot of things can be made to work after installing firmware and if you pick well supported (often older) hardware to begin with, it’s nowhere near as out-of-the-box complete or well supported as most mainstream Linux distributions.
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I’m running OpenBSD 6.3-current on a second-hand T430s, and the only problem I had was needing a wired connection when first installing 6.2 back in October 2017 because the OS wanted to pull the wifi firmware after first boot. After that, it’s been such a smooth experience that I wouldn’t consider going back to Linux for any use case beside building a Microsoft-free gaming rig.
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Out of curiously, what ThinkPad are you specifically talking about? Just last week I tried to install OpenBSD on my X41 (again) after the update from 6.2 to 6.3 had worked out so smoothly on my server, but I just couldn’t reestablish the comfortableness I enjoy with Void. I guess, I’d really have to force myself to set everything up properly, but I just don’t have the time (or the experience) for that.
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I feel like I’ve put too many tags, but there isnt a catchall tag for systems administrations like there is for programming.
I have a linux / bsd sys admin interview on tuesday morning, so I’m looking up questions.
Good luck.