I'm curious if anyone here currently works (or has very recently worked) somewhere where proprietary Unix is still used for production. If so, can you tell me what they're used for and why those deployments haven't been moved to an appropriate Linux distribution?

Not suggesting Linux is necessarily better for all use cases, just wondering what keeps these small number of entities clinging to closed-source Unix with presumably pricey license costs.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34017934

Points: 194

# Comments: 210

It would be awesome if there were a book or tutorial that walks you through environment configuration, and then shows you some examples of how to use the GPU to solve some real world, non graphics problems.

For the record, I'm not asking about graphics programming or OpenGL, I'm asking specifically about general purpose computing on GPUs.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33194826

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

I told him range() has been there since the 90s and that his professors were just bad at Python. The thing is, I'm not actually sure about the first part. I know the history of some features, for example, I know that list-comprehensions were only added in Python 2 around 2000 and I know that map, reduce, and filter were added pretty early (like 1993) by programmers who were familiar with lisp. But I'm finding it really hard to find out when specific, arbitrary features were added to Python (or to other languages).

Google is no help because regardless of how I structure my query or tweak the search options, it just shows me endless SEO drivel sites that are only remotely related to what I searched. Anyone have a better way to find out stuff like this?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31182517

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

The actual economic data doesn't support that. Slaves were never more than 17% of the population, slavery was only ever legal in certain regions, and use of slaves was mostly relegated to a subset of agricultural labor. Moreover, slavery was outlawed in 1865 and the United States would not be considered an "economic engine of the world" until at least the 1880s, and it would not be considered one for its agricultural output but for its industrialized economy.

Furthermore, countries in the new world (e.g. Haiti, Brazil, that practiced slavery for longer and on a larger scale failed to develop strong economies anywhere to the degree that the United States did, so the line from "had slavery in the past" to "became economically prosperous" is tenuous. In fact, slave labor (and adjacent systems like serfdom) historically tends to hamper economic growth, prevent industrialization, and stifle innovation.

AST (abstract syntax tree) interpreters are about the easiest form of language implementation to write, but they typically result in pretty slow performance due to the amount of memory they take up, the additional instructions involved in evaluating an AST, and the difficulty in making them cache-efficient. For this reason, it seems that most interpreted (or traditionally interpreted, e.g. "scripting languages") opt to use some combination of a bytecode interpreter or JIT-compilation for their most common implementations. Examples include Python , JavaScript, PHP, Lua, Perl, and so on.

I'm curious, however, what common (feel free to stretch the definition of "common") programming languages or implementations use an AST interpreter instead. From what I can tell it's not many - Matz's Ruby Interpreter is one of them, but I'm not very deep into the Ruby world and I don't know how common it is to use MRI vs another implementation. Besides that, I find it likely that many command line languages (bash, zsh, cmd.exe, powershell, etc.) and some Unix utils (like sed or awk, which are programming languages, albeit small ones) are implemented as simple AST interpreters since the most common usage patterns for these languages are short-running or IO-bound scripts and commands.

Curious to hear what everyone has to say and if any of my assumptions are incorrect.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29397456

Points: 1

# Comments: 2

All of world history involves the push and pull of various groups competing for land and resources. Somehow we're supposed to treat every single one of the hundreds of pre-Columbian peoples who occupied North America with a sort of reverence like they were the only rightful inhabitants of the continent. Even though these hundreds of groups fought amongst each other for land and resources before and after the arrival of Europeans. Every single major conflict in North America since 1492 (including the American civil war) has seen Native groups fighting on both sides - because they were people with agency and not monolithic in their views and interests.

Do people in other parts of the world act like this? When a conference is held in conference in Turkey, is it important to mention that the area was previously controlled by Mongols, Seljuk Turks, Christian Greeks, Romans, Hellenic Greeks, Persians, Assyrians, Luwians, Hittites, Hattians, etc. ?

That's not to say it's useless, it's a nice tool to have in the standard library, but if you're coming from one of the many mainstream programming languages with lightweight threading libraries which make it much easier to take advantage of parallelism it's easy to get frustrated at both python's standard threading and multiprocessing libraries for their respective shortcomings, at least in their CPython implementations.

Are you trying to say that the situation in Europe is just "business as usual" or something?

Now I don't know if you've been paying attention these last few years, but in case you're not aware European countries have taken in a pretty unprecedented number of migrants over the last decade. Many of those migrants were/are young men from regions with cultural norms that are fundamentally different from the European countries that they end up in. In addition, many of these migrants lack strong proficiency in the standard language of the host country, and do not possess a level of education that would generally be commensurate with their age in the host country. Note that none of this is meant as a value judgement, it's just the reality of the situation. It's not an easy situation for the migrant or for the administration of the countries taking them in. It's not really any secret that integration/assimilation has failed in many parts of Europe, and this all has consequences.

With regards to gun violence, I don't know about Europe in General but Sweden's rate of gun homicides has risen consistently every year over the last decade. Obviously the numbers are nothing compared to what you'd see in the United States, but if the problem is getting worse, then it's probably worth talking about. Also, for a highly-developed Western country, Sweden experiences a large number of hand-grenade attacks every year in a pattern that also seems to be increasing.

But the main cause of violence tends to be organized crime, and as seen by the murder of Peter R De Vries earlier this year, a lot of European police agencies are simply not cut out to deal with organized crime in their current state.

Europeans also discover that weapons restrictions only go so far when you have active organized criminal groups with the initiative and contacts necessary to smuggle firearms and grenades into Western/Northern Europe from a number of regions (Ex-Yugoslavia, Albania, former Soviet Union, North Africa, etc.) that are only a car-ride or fishing boat trip away.

Swiss gun owners are allowed to buy, own, and use ammunition. They may also use a privately-owned firearm in self-defense situationally, but the legal justification for use of deadly force in Switzerland will obviously be more stringent than it would be in the United States.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_regulation_in_Switzer...

The main thing that sets the US apart from other countries is not that civilians can own AR15s or similar weapons, it's that US law for the most part gives any adult the legal right to purchase and own firearms by default, provided that they can pass a background check. The United States and Yemen are basically the only countries that use this system. Basically every other country has some sort of tiered licensing system for firearms ownership, with varying levels of strictness. And as it happens, Switzerland is pretty unrestrictive in this regard. The Swiss "Firearms acquisition permit" looks essentially equivalent to the United State's "Form 4473" which is required for the majority of firearms transactions.

https://www.ch.ch/en/acquiring-firearm/

In what way is a RC helicopter with a camera on it in a public place "force"?

And with regards to force it's not "only deployed against a specific political demographic". Tons of the BLM protests over the last year went by without any major intervention from law enforcement. In fact, in plenty of cities the police departments outright stated that they supported the protests and did the whole "kneel in solidarity" thing. Call it an empty gesture if you like but it's a far cry from what you're describing. I watched tons of livestreams during that time. It was usually only when the looting, random assaults, arson, etc. got out of hand that serious riot control measures were put in place. And even then, lots of police departments seemed to think that it was better to just let the city get looted and burned than to risk more bad press for the Police by engaging the perpetrators. Not sure what you mean by "pro-Trump insurgents get treated like gentlemen, and get to take selfies with the police who should be arresting them" - if you're referring to January 6th, then perhaps you're remembering wrong. There was tear gas all over the place and 4 of the pro-Trump rioters were killed by law enforcement.