Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45014003

Points: 2

# Comments: 3

Exactly. The old "I'm sorry I got caught" and not "I'm sorry I did it."

In the US I am pretty sure we are already on the decline.

I think it has to do with, during the industrial revolution and post-war, huge scientific advancements and tech grew the economy, fed capitalism by means of providing new desirable goods to consumers (e.g. dishwashers, nicer cars, etc.)

I wonder if we've reached a "peak" of consumer comfort where advances in science/ tech/ medicine are no longer frequent/ impactful enough to meaningfully satisfy consumers, (why do we care about exploring Mars?) so it's easy for people to reject it and say "we don't need science."

I've used debootstrap to build a Debian distro for ARM with a custom kernel (for an Olimex board target or Beaglebone.) That's very hands-off and not nearly the same "depth" as LFS. The next step was taking the same kernel and building a busybox-based rootfs. Then I had to make my own PID 1 and do init work to bring up services such as networking on boot which was very educational, yet busybox provides most of the "lego bricks" that you're not left writing too much from scratch.

Building to an embedded target also allows one to punt on the most annoying and complex parts of a desktop linux distro, such as the desktop environment, audio/video drivers, UEFI bootloader, etc. Building a semi-custom (e.g. Arch or Debian/debootstrap, Buildroot or OpenEmbedded) headless distro was what I'd call a "shallow dive" or gentle introduction to more of Linux's inner workings without having to understand every bit in order to get a running system.

Granted each one is built by hand so the artisanal craft is easy to appreciate.

But exclusivity is there, because these shops are building less than a dozen bikes per year. If you got your hands on one, wow it will turn heads when you roll up to the bier garden at the CX race.

I started poking at some source files at random in ntoskernel, and it only took a minute to get some "hits" from the ReactOS source:

    $ rg InitializeContextThread
    ./ntoskrnl/ke/thrdobj.c:872:        KiInitializeContextThread(Thread,
    ./ntoskrnl/ke/powerpc/thrdini.c:53:KiInitializeContextThread(IN PKTHREAD Thread,
    ./ntoskrnl/ke/i386/thrdini.c:92:KiInitializeContextThread(IN PKTHREAD Thread,
    ./ntoskrnl/ke/amd64/thrdini.c:36:KiInitializeContextThread(IN PKTHREAD Thread,
    ./ntoskrnl/ke/arm/thrdini.c:53:KiInitializeContextThread(IN PKTHREAD Thread,
    ./ntoskrnl/include/internal/ke.h:464:KiInitializeContextThread(

    $ rg NpxFrame
    ./ntoskrnl/ke/i386/v86vdm.c:473:    PFX_SAVE_AREA NpxFrame;
    ./ntoskrnl/ke/i386/v86vdm.c:480:    NpxFrame = &StackFrame->NpxArea;
    ./ntoskrnl/ke/i386/v86vdm.c:481:    ASSERT((ULONG_PTR)NpxFrame % 16 == 0);
    ./ntoskrnl/ke/i386/v86vdm.c:485:    RtlCopyMemory(KiGetThreadNpxArea(Thread), NpxFrame, sizeof(FX_SAVE_AREA));
    ./ntoskrnl/ke/i386/v86vdm.c:510:    PFX_SAVE_AREA NpxFrame = &StackFrame->NpxArea;
    ./ntoskrnl/ke/i386/v86vdm.c:512:    ASSERT((ULONG_PTR)NpxFrame % 16 == 0);
    ./ntoskrnl/ke/i386/v86vdm.c:551:    RtlCopyMemory(NpxFrame, V86Frame->ThreadStack, sizeof(FX_SAVE_AREA));

[1] https://github.com/Zer0Mem0ry/ntoskrnl

[2] https://sourceforge.net/projects/reactos/files/ReactOS/

The recovery mode could even be initiated remotely, so you could re-flash a device without ever touching it. Of course you have to be careful, if the re-flash failed you could be SOL :) Apparently I need to go back and improve it so we can re-flash without rebooting!

These days you can use things like containers (Balena also looks very cool) to achieve a similar goal in possibly a "safer" way. But the idea of being able to re-flash the entire system while running it felt sort of like changing the engine of a car while driving it down the freeway!

I've got a 15" "late 2013" rMBP, set display options to "more space." I've got a total of 45 tabs open between a couple different windows (I use the userChrome hack to re-enable multiple tab rows.) Cycled between tabs, refreshed, navigated around FB, GMail, etc. Can't get the CPU to do anything out of the ordinary.

  - mdnsd (not in Busybox), 
  - merecat httpd (much more full-featured than busybox  httpd) 
  - inadyn dynamic DNS updater
  - finit (IMO much nicer than busybox's runsv)
  - watchdogd
  - uftpd
  - ntpd (with ipv6 support!)

That's not to say they are blameless but we could point fingers at pretty much every federal agency. ICE is just in the crosshairs at the moment.

Literally half of programmers: "Ugh why can't everything be Javascript" Other half of programmers: "Ugh Javascript is the worst language in existence" /s

Given that javascript (esp on mobile) has a hard time reaching native performance, they presumably chose Dart because its design makes it immensely easier to target native iOS and Android without drastically augmenting JS to the point where it's no longer JS.

If there's a non-JS language that's easy to learn for a JS programmer, Dart (and I guess, TS) are it.