Hacker News: M_Bakhtiari

New comment by M_Bakhtiari in "Microsoft Releases a Linux Version of the ProcDump Sysinternals Tool"

M_Bakhtiari — Tue, 06 Nov 2018 09:07:48 +0000

Targeting multiple architectures is a solved problem, as you said with LLVM. I don't know if that's how WASM is currently implemented, as a LLVM front-end, but I'm pretty sure most implementations in fact are proper native compiled, or they intend to be. As I said it would be silly to do it any other way.

New comment by M_Bakhtiari in "The Copyleft Bust Up"

M_Bakhtiari — Tue, 06 Nov 2018 08:35:56 +0000

I believe he's talking about attribution, not advertising.

New comment by M_Bakhtiari in "The Copyleft Bust Up"

M_Bakhtiari — Tue, 06 Nov 2018 08:30:27 +0000

Signature wouldn't mean anything if there was no warranty. In which case warranty is what they sell and the signature is just a minor technical detail. And selling warranty on software is already a thing.

New comment by M_Bakhtiari in "Microsoft Releases a Linux Version of the ProcDump Sysinternals Tool"

M_Bakhtiari — Mon, 05 Nov 2018 12:55:07 +0000

Why wouldn't WASM implementations do native compilation? It's the norm for most modern language implementations nowadays, anything else would be silly.

New comment by M_Bakhtiari in "Microsoft Releases a Linux Version of the ProcDump Sysinternals Tool"

M_Bakhtiari — Mon, 05 Nov 2018 12:52:30 +0000

> At this point such a contraption would be less painful than some of Apple's recent transitions (e.g. from PPC to x86).

I find that hard to believe. Apple only had to build emulators for their ISA changes, just translating instruction set into another. Doesn't sound painful at all. WINE on the other hand has good reasons for pointing out that it's not an emulator.

New comment by M_Bakhtiari in "Why [Insert Thing Here] Is Not a Password Killer"

M_Bakhtiari — Mon, 05 Nov 2018 12:33:06 +0000

I can't help but think that browser vendors could have at least made an effort to make client certs and Kerberos authentication more user-friendly on the web. Perhaps not so useful for private consumers, but it would sure come in handy in enterprise.

New comment by M_Bakhtiari in "iPhones are allergic to helium"

M_Bakhtiari — Wed, 31 Oct 2018 09:15:14 +0000

Maybe not a good idea to use MEMS avionics on a blimp or dirigible, then.

Here's the Zeppelin NT cockpit, but I can't tell what kind of gyros they may be using: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/2003-07-...

New comment by M_Bakhtiari in "Actors for Squeak Smalltalk"

M_Bakhtiari — Tue, 30 Oct 2018 10:28:45 +0000

Is the spawning overhead comparable to that of Erlang's BEAM?

New comment by M_Bakhtiari in "Lion Air crash: Boeing 737 plane crashes in sea off Jakarta"

M_Bakhtiari — Tue, 30 Oct 2018 10:13:17 +0000

Their sales organisation is always available to answer technical questions about the model of aircraft, but nothing of that is relevant to any of the journalists who might enquire in light of the crash, unless they are trying to play armchair accident investigators.

New comment by M_Bakhtiari in "Lion Air crash: Boeing 737 plane crashes in sea off Jakarta"

M_Bakhtiari — Mon, 29 Oct 2018 14:56:45 +0000

Would you prefer the alternative, "Sorry about the crash. Allow us to run our mouths about things we are not competent to comment on given the presently available information"?

New comment by M_Bakhtiari in "The 747 that went to Burning Man: What really happened"

M_Bakhtiari — Mon, 29 Oct 2018 14:41:58 +0000

Reminds me of the Vultures' plane in the Lucas Arts classic Full Throttle: https://lparchive.org/Full-Throttle-(Screenshot)/Update%2010...

New comment by M_Bakhtiari in "IBM acquires Red Hat"

M_Bakhtiari — Mon, 29 Oct 2018 14:22:33 +0000

> That's a massive, show-stopping problem.

How so?

I agree that it's a nontrivial problem to learn a piece of complex software from scratch to the point that you can offer comprehensive enterprise support for it, but how is that show-stopping?

New comment by M_Bakhtiari in "IBM acquires Red Hat"

M_Bakhtiari — Mon, 29 Oct 2018 13:24:44 +0000

Radical differentiation from competitors is the name of the game for entrepreneurs. Online communities in general and Hacker News in particular have every reason to push back and reject low-effort Redditisms and 4chanisms.

New comment by M_Bakhtiari in "IBM acquires Red Hat"

M_Bakhtiari — Mon, 29 Oct 2018 12:32:07 +0000

> "The cloud" is a set of APIs for provisioning but also a bunch of managed services that surround your instances, pub/sub, DNS, load balancers, managed SQL. All of this is almost designed to be a vendor lock-in.

A lot of it is, but I strongly disagree that all of it is. Many of these are perfectly interchangeable with the exact same software (FOSS DBMS, web server, load balancer, etc.) running on a competitor's managed service, VPS or on your own premises. As for the services that aren't, I do think the IT architects and managers who agree to use them are absolutely crazy and ought to be fired. If all of them are fired, cloud providers would be forced to provide interoperable provisioning APIs and services or perish.

> However, disregarding the vendor lock-in: How does my OS integrating with AWS's APIs help my on-prem services?

I suppose it doesn't, but why should it? If you think they bloat up your local installation, maybe you can just not install the kernel modules/daemons/libraries in question.

New comment by M_Bakhtiari in "IBM acquires Red Hat"

M_Bakhtiari — Mon, 29 Oct 2018 10:05:25 +0000

> Except corporate users usually want support.

What prevents anyone from offering an enterprise support program for Arch?

New comment by M_Bakhtiari in "IBM acquires Red Hat"

M_Bakhtiari — Mon, 29 Oct 2018 10:04:33 +0000

> I'd suggest building an auto-upgrade system on top of Arch (or Alpine), and go for immutable infrastructure as the selling point. That's stepping on CoreOS's toes a bit, but I haven't seen any progress from that crowd ever since Red Hat bought them, so it'll probably get even worse now.

In that case, why not go all the way over to NixOS? They already have a more or less complete cloud stack with NixOps, the only problem is hardly anyone knows how to use it.

New comment by M_Bakhtiari in "IBM acquires Red Hat"

M_Bakhtiari — Mon, 29 Oct 2018 09:57:42 +0000

> The cognitive dissonance is so strong here.

Where? Can you give an example of an expression of cognitive dissonance here?

New comment by M_Bakhtiari in "IBM acquires Red Hat"

M_Bakhtiari — Mon, 29 Oct 2018 09:51:10 +0000

> "the cloud" is, and always has been, antithetical to Unix (Unix being about site autonomy and simple tools working together)

Does the physical hardware being on the actual premises or not really have anything to do with "site autonomy" or the granularity of the toolchains?

In fact, can you even buy any viable physical hardware to run on your site that's not already a virtualised "cloud" with the real host OS firmly in the control of your corporate overlords, e.g. Intel ME and AMD PSP?

New comment by M_Bakhtiari in "The popular Iranian tradition of using Hafez’s poems for divination"

M_Bakhtiari — Fri, 26 Oct 2018 11:49:34 +0000

Where do the stars enter into the equation in this parrot astrology?

New comment by M_Bakhtiari in "Show HN: TeXMe – Self-Rendering Markdown and LaTeX Documents"

M_Bakhtiari — Fri, 26 Oct 2018 11:18:58 +0000

Does it say anywhere in that manual why the right margin is supposed to be so narrow? I find it very uncomfortable to read texts with very narrow margins.