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Also thought that some of the technical points were good, but... Mixing together Linux and Unix? Saying that killing a process from command line in Linux is ba

by h1x 7y ago

Also thought that some of the technical points were good, but... Mixing together Linux and Unix? Saying that killing a process from command line in Linux is bad because MacOS has GUI for that? Not explaining in more detail a claim that C is responsible for Spectre? Topping a technical presentation with political statements? That's too much for 30 minutes I think.

catalogia 7y ago
The Activity Monitor is hardly even the fastest way to kill a process in macOS. Usually when I'm working on something that goes haywire needs killing, I already know the process name and a simple `killall example` can be typed out faster than he can ⌘-space his way into the Activity Monitor and navigate that GUI. I don't think that proves anything profound though, just that his example was weak. I went into this video agreeing with the stated premise (and still do), but this presentation was a bit underwhelming.
- celticmusic 7y ago
  linux has pkill as well.
H_Pylori 7y ago
>Mixing together Linux and Unix? Oh, the horror. For all intent and purposes they are exactly the same and they share the same philosophy.
celticmusic 7y ago
yeah, the whole conduct thing was weird and felt like part of a different talk. I kept expecting him to try and bring it back to the rest of his talk and he never really did outside of it being somewhat related to the idea of "lets do things differently in the future".
kragen 7y ago
> Not explaining in more detail a claim that C is responsible for Spectre? He said trying to paper over the concurrency of the hardware to provide the simple in-order model C expects is responsible for Spectre (and he did explain how Spectre works). This is true but I don't think C is really the reason for this; designing a language that productively exposes parallelism but is easy to program the kinds of things that run fast on modern amd64 CPUs, I think that might be an unsolved problem.
IshKebab 7y ago
> Saying that killing a process from command line in Linux is bad because MacOS has GUI for that? He wasn't saying that `ps | grep | kill` is bad because MacOS has a GUI. He was saying that it is bad (it is, that's pretty undeniable), and that dogmatically following the "Unix philosophy" would lead you to conclude that it is great, even though there's an obviously better way to do it (through a nice GUI). To put it another way, "do one thing and do it well" is fine, if all of your users are happy to write all the glue to stick tiny programs together, and the only glue you have is completely unstructured text streams. But most people are not willing to do that. To take it to an obvious extreme: what is the Unix version of Excel? `set_cell A4 'hello' && recalculate_formula B5 && cat A1:D2 | pi_chart`??
- h1x 7y ago
  > To take it to an obvious extreme: what is the Unix version of Excel? `set_cell A4 'hello' && recalculate_formula B5 && cat A1:D2 | pi_chart`?? That's a nice question. It's not that obvious extreme for me though. You could use sc and GNU plot (I know... GNU's not Unix). Simple example: - first you configure your plot $ echo "set terminal png\nset output 'plot.png'\nplot '/dev/stdin' with lines" > plotcfg.plg - then you create a spreadsheet and pass it to gnuplot. It's easier to edit the spreadsheet with sc's TUI $ echo 'let A0 = 1\nlet B0 = 8\nlet A1 = 2\nlet B1 = 16\nlet A2 = 3\nlet B2 = 32\n' | sc -W '%' - | gnuplot plotcfg.plg
  - IshKebab 7y ago
    So easy!
fetbaffe 7y ago
Here is an article explaining Spectre & Meltdown with regards to C. https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479 It has been discussed previously multiple times here at HN, the latest from three weeks ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21888096 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21888096

by h1x 7y ago

catalogia 7y ago

The Activity Monitor is hardly even the fastest way to kill a process in macOS. Usually when I'm working on something that goes haywire needs killing, I already know the process name and a simple `killall example` can be typed out faster than he can ⌘-space his way into the Activity Monitor and navigate that GUI. I don't think that proves anything profound though, just that his example was weak. I went into this video agreeing with the stated premise (and still do), but this presentation was a bit underwhelming.

celticmusic 7y ago
linux has pkill as well.

H_Pylori 7y ago

>Mixing together Linux and Unix? Oh, the horror. For all intent and purposes they are exactly the same and they share the same philosophy.

celticmusic 7y ago

yeah, the whole conduct thing was weird and felt like part of a different talk. I kept expecting him to try and bring it back to the rest of his talk and he never really did outside of it being somewhat related to the idea of "lets do things differently in the future".

kragen 7y ago

> Not explaining in more detail a claim that C is responsible for Spectre? He said trying to paper over the concurrency of the hardware to provide the simple in-order model C expects is responsible for Spectre (and he did explain how Spectre works). This is true but I don't think C is really the reason for this; designing a language that productively exposes parallelism but is easy to program the kinds of things that run fast on modern amd64 CPUs, I think that might be an unsolved problem.

IshKebab 7y ago

> Saying that killing a process from command line in Linux is bad because MacOS has GUI for that? He wasn't saying that `ps | grep | kill` is bad because MacOS has a GUI. He was saying that it is bad (it is, that's pretty undeniable), and that dogmatically following the "Unix philosophy" would lead you to conclude that it is great, even though there's an obviously better way to do it (through a nice GUI). To put it another way, "do one thing and do it well" is fine, if all of your users are happy to write all the glue to stick tiny programs together, and the only glue you have is completely unstructured text streams. But most people are not willing to do that. To take it to an obvious extreme: what is the Unix version of Excel? `set_cell A4 'hello' && recalculate_formula B5 && cat A1:D2 | pi_chart`??

h1x 7y ago
> To take it to an obvious extreme: what is the Unix version of Excel? `set_cell A4 'hello' && recalculate_formula B5 && cat A1:D2 | pi_chart`?? That's a nice question. It's not that obvious extreme for me though. You could use sc and GNU plot (I know... GNU's not Unix). Simple example: - first you configure your plot $ echo "set terminal png\nset output 'plot.png'\nplot '/dev/stdin' with lines" > plotcfg.plg - then you create a spreadsheet and pass it to gnuplot. It's easier to edit the spreadsheet with sc's TUI $ echo 'let A0 = 1\nlet B0 = 8\nlet A1 = 2\nlet B1 = 16\nlet A2 = 3\nlet B2 = 32\n' | sc -W '%' - | gnuplot plotcfg.plg
- IshKebab 7y ago
  So easy!

fetbaffe 7y ago

Here is an article explaining Spectre & Meltdown with regards to C. https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479 It has been discussed previously multiple times here at HN, the latest from three weeks ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21888096 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21888096