I don't understand how "only a vague idea" is able to raise millions of dollars in the first place. Can you elaborate or give an example?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17302675

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Unite is a typical example of something that worked fine and disappear all the same. I haven't find any browser that surpass Opera 12 to this day. All the new "exciting stuff" are no use to me. I don't want to adapt to my browser, I want a browser that adapt to me.

  def name := "Hackernews"
  # greeting == "Hi Hackernews!"
  def greeting := `Hi $name!`
  # language == "Lojban"
  def `@language is awesome` := "Lojban is awesome"

  # one == "", two == "cool"
  def `adjacent @one@two patterns` := "adjacent cool patterns"

To the second part of your question: as you have undoubtedly noticed, you've never heard of E nor Monte.

Nearly all serious compilers have at least one representation which is not isomorphic for all programs. (It is homomorphic, which is required for the compiler to be correct.) As a consequence, at least some programs will be mangled beyond recognition.

If you convince people that science is true or real not by logic, but by rhetorical tricks, then you are no longer peddling truth; you are blindly proclaiming that science is the only correct epistemology.

> The goal of the Quantum Render project is to take the WebRender compositor in Servo and embed it in Firefox

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/Quantum_Render

You're not wrong that Erlang and Scheme are just as much about objects and message-passing as they are about actors.

Kay may or may not agree with me, but I like to require a facet he mentioned in another discussion once: The uniform calling interface. This is the property of objects that you may send any message to any object. If you require this, then Java and C++ disqualify themselves neatly.

"Secure", as a word, does not make things secure. "Container", as a word, also does not make things secure.

Sandboxes come in two flavors: Correct by construction, and exploitable. Which flavor is this system?

What makes this better than NixOS? Than Genode? Than Qubes? Where is the actual security writeup? Where's the explanation of the security model for the system? How would I write code which takes advantage of structural security in the system?

Edit: There's a writeup here: https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit/blob/master/docs/securi... And the Mirage design is here: https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit/blob/master/projects/mi...

In short, to answer my earlier questions, the sandboxing is undocumented, comparisons to other security-oriented setups are omitted, the limit of structural security is OCaml's type system... This seems like an interesting effort but I am disappointed that it seems more like lip service than an attempt to actually improve on the state of security design.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14138171

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Second, it's completely reasonable to imagine data-structure-driven improvements to the task of writing source code. Imagine, for example, an AST editor. There are tools like org-mode and paredit which are halfway to true AST editing, and plenty of languages have tooling sufficient to support it, if there were demand. An AST editor would, of course, generalize the lessons here about ropes to pretty-printed ASTs, but there's no innate reason why it couldn't be done.

Third, a meta-comment, to address your comment elsewhere in the thread: "There are, of course, computer science concepts that are very smart. But we don't need these to save us from slow software, because today's slow software problem is just the result of people doing bad things in layer upon layer. We have to stop doing all the bad stuff and dig us out of the hole we're in, just to get back to neutral. Once we are back at neutral, then we can try thinking about some computer science smarty stuff to take us forward."

There are assumptions here about the nature of CS. CS is a science of abstractions. Complaining about layers in CS is complaining about the very nature of CS. Software is slow and insecure and hard to use because the tasks that we demand of software are extremely complex and our human processes for creating code are not sufficiently high-level, powerful, and expressive enough for us to design good systems on the first try.

Whenever somebody says, "I have removed a useless abstraction," they usually forget to also say, "By replacing it with a useful abstraction."

If it fails to terrify you, reread.