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"...Later that day, a separate team from Apple informed The Times that the apps would be removed".

Am I reading that right? Seems like the Times is not-so-subtly implying that Apple tipped off the Chinese authorities. Maybe they mentioned the scathing nature of the article that could potentially paint China in bad light.

For those that didn't read that article, it unveils billions of dollars in perks given to Foxconn/Apple: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/29/technology/apple-iphone-ch...


I'm a student at Johns Hopkins, and we're using xv6 in our OS course this semester: http://gaming.jhu.edu/~phf/2015/fall/cs318/

xv6 is pretty awesome for learning, and lecture is generally spent reading through the source code, some of which is...cute.

Most of us have the source code printed out. If you're interested in reading the source, this document is well-formated: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2014/xv6/xv6-rev8.pdf (and can actually be generated by the Makefile!)


I went through my school's version of this class on xv6, and wow, what a trip. After thinking hard and working hard on things I never had a solid grasp on - filesystems, virtual memory, interrupts, multitasking - I now appreciate and understand things going on after a call to fork() or exec().

For my final project I implemented a simple threading library based on the interface that pthread() uses. It's amazing how beautifully simple kernels can be.


So the ls and make and all those tools; where do they come from? Are they straight compiles using GNU gcc tools etc?

I only ask because I have no idea how much is the kernel compared to everything else; and if it has its own custom compiler or whatever.


No, they are minimal versions written for the OS. Here is ls[0] and cat[1]. You can compile with GCC.

[0] http://www.ccs.neu.edu/course/cs3650/unix-xv6/HTML/S/64.html [1] http://www.ccs.neu.edu/course/cs3650/unix-xv6/HTML/S/42.html


I wonder if a suitably minimalist C compiler (along the lines of C4[1] or C4x86[2], although perhaps a bit more featured) and/or assembler to go along with it would be a neat idea too - now you can have a complete self-bootstrapping OS which one person can easily understand.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8558822

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8746054


By reading `cat`, how come that error messages are printend on standard output and the exit code is always 0? stderr and exit codes are not implemented/used in xv6?


Northeastern (my school, currently...) uses it as well. A quick search leads me to believe many schools do. Wonderful learning tool. Also fun to try to port to non-x86 :)


OP article lists a lot of schools using it as well.


This looks awesome! I've been meaning to checkout F# (I come from an OCaml background), and I think I've now found my gateway...

Cheers,


I started out with OCaml too, it's a really easy transition into F#. You can basically cut and paste OCaml code into F#, unless it involves stuff like Functors, first class modules, and polymorphic variants.

Active Patterns are a pretty cool F# feature that OCaml doesn't have. You can do something that's effectively the same with OCaml macros, but those are a lot more tedious.

The F# intellisense and code completion are great productivity enhancers, especially when it comes to working with unfamiliar libraries.

My biggest hurdle in transitioning from OCaml to F# was learning my way around the .Net ecosystem, so it was still a relatively minor one.

If you decide to get into F# and have any questions about it someone on the #fsharp channel on the Functional Programming Slack[1] usually has an answer.

[1] http://fpchat.com/ <- sign up here, invites usually arrive within 24hrs


"A week later, Smith published an open letter calling for Yahoo to...merge with AOL. Redundancies could be eliminated, thousands of people could be fired and two former Internet superpowers would be downsized into a single and steady (if uninspiring) entity...'We trust the board and management will do the right thing for shareholders, even if this may mean accepting AOL as the surviving entity'"

I see where Smith is coming from, but that doesn't make his case any less unsettling. Do some economists really believe that the "right" thing to do is fire thousands of people?

Are a company's shareholders really more important than its employees?


> Do some economists really believe that the "right" thing to do is fire thousands of people?

Yes. The idea is that they'd be more productive in other companies (or start their own). In a country with decent employee protections, unemployment provisions, and public healthcare, it can even be more-or-less true.

> Are a company's shareholders really more important than its employees?

Yes. With employees, there is a contract, which in some fictional-economics sense was a negotiated agreement between equals, so the company only has those obligations laid out in that contract (just as with bondholders). With shareholders there is no contract, instead the company has a fiduciary duty to act in their best interests.


I take it you don't agree with the story you mention from your tone, so I'm not arguing with you.

However, as the concept of work to rule (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule) shows, employees don't treat themselves as being only obligated to do what their contracts specify, and it would be disastrous if they did. Similarly, managers view themselves as owing something to their employees that's not specified in the contract.

Hostile takeovers often work by going into a company and breaking all the relationships of trust that previously existed. By doing that, you can often cut costs in ways that the previous management couldn't do. (Here's the paper, though I confess I've only read the summaries of it: http://www.nber.org/chapters/c2052.pdf)


Fewer and fewer people believe this myth nowadays as opposed to 10-15 years ago.

https://hbr.org/2010/04/the-myth-of-shareholder-capitalism

Jack Welsh never did believe it.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/06/26/the-orig...


No. A company's most important duty is to its customers; without them there is no income or profit. Its second most important duty is to its employees; without them there are no products or services to sell to the customers. Coming in third are the stockholders; the parasites who risk a bit of capital in order to profit from people who actually produce things.


"Are a company's shareholders really more important than its employees?"

Shareholders in this sense actually represent financial responsibility.

One could argue that Yahoo! has been hurting it's employees by failing it's shareholders (financial obligations). As a result, massive layoffs will be required, whereas if Yahoo! had maintained it's health, it's numbers would have grown/shrank organically.

In this sense, the Alibaba money only delayed, and made worse the correction to Yahoo!'s underlying business model.


While I can't answer your question(s), I do wonder why Yahoo and AOL fill me with no feeling whatsoever. This, for as long as I can remember (save a few select years in the mid 90s). It's amazing how these companies can still be around, though I understand "Middle America" still uses them.


Yahoo sports is really good, for example. It's not a bad aggregator in general and has good original content mixed in.

I don't understand the synergy with AOL at all. What does AOL bring to the table?


This may seem odd, but if I knew I could make a soft-landing (live on savings or benefit for a while) I'd be fine with getting let go. I now live in a country where people can do this and it stuns me that I don't see more entrepreneurship; if I could spend 6 months living in a meager fashion but sure of a roof over my head I'd take it in an instant to work on starting my own thing. I can't though (I used to live in the US where it's too easy to wind up in the gutter, and where I live now I'm not a citizen), so I value my job very highly.


I don't understand your sentiment here. If there is a large overlap and both companies are struggling (and struggling is dying when you're an Internet company), why not eradicate inefficiencies and try and build a stronger player?

AOL and Yahoo are not beholden to provide for their employees in perpetuity. That's a very Japanese mindset.


Skeleton is the only "sane" CSS boilerplate framework I've encountered. It's incredibly minimal -- the entire framework is so small and elegant that I can crank out websites without delving into the subtleties of the documentation. I find it really intuitive to use, and while I don't do a lot of web dev, when I do it's almost always with Skeleton.

Anyways, I'm so glad you're working on Skeleton again! Congrats on the 2.0 release, and thanks for all of the hard work!


    div class="eleven columns"
I'd rather keep my styling in my stylesheet. Using mixins rather than styling classes allows a developer to look in a single place - the SCSS - to determine how something looks.


Have you looked at PocketGrid?

It's one of these situations where less is more. The library weights 517 bytes minified, and it lets you write semantic markup.

http://arnaudleray.github.io/pocketgrid/docs/

https://github.com/arnaudleray/pocketgrid

————

Edit: here's the pitch:

* Lightweight: about 0.5kB!

* Pure CSS-only (no CSS preprocessor needed)

* Fluid (by default, but you can set a fixed width or max-width if you want)

* Responsive

* Unlimited number of breakpoints (you can define your own Media Queries)

* Mobile-first compatible (block width is 100% by default)

* Content-first compatible (you can swap columns and you can define your own breakpoints for each content in your page to fine-tune and optimize your content readability: not only 'tablet' or 'smartphone' breakpoints)

* Semantic (as much as a pure CSS grid could be ;) )

* Very simple (just have to define blocks and groups of blocks)

* Unlimited number of columns (no 12 or 16 columns restrictions: blocks just require a width in percentage)

* Unlimited nested grids

* Manage consistent gutters (gutters can be defined in pixels or ems, which is better than percentage-based solutions because it allows consistent gutters even in nested grids)

* Automatic rows (when a row is full, the next blocks go to a new row without doing anything)

* No dependencies

* Compatible with CSS frameworks such as Twitter Bootstrap or Zurb Foundation (you can use the Bootstrap or Foundation components such as buttons, tabs, etc. and use the Pocket grid for other layout)

* Compatibility: IE6+, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, and mobile browsers (iPhone, iPad, Android...)

————

Edit2, I just submitted it separately: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8729316


Generally I like to hand-write SCSS: I've used Bootstrap and Pure and they're filled with:

- workarounds for browsers I don't care about. Two blocks in SCSS becomes 4 in a framework

- styling done using classes, as above.

- grid systems that can be replaced with a few characters of SCSS maths


I've worked with Bourbon Neat and found it pretty nice, it's a series of mixins so you can use semantec classes however you want.

http://neat.bourbon.io/


I don't have any hands on experience with SASS, but IIUC, you can `@include` and `@extend` PocketGrid as well.


Didn't knew this one!


Semantic UI is really good as well.

http://semantic-ui.com/


Semantic UI is ~0.5MB minified while Skeleton is ~20KB.


Aside from what has already been said (SemUI is a MASSIVE piece of CSS), Semantic UI is also not semantic.

<article> is semantic <div class="article full width"> is not semantic, it's describing how it should appear.

You can break half of the examples page by just clicking everywhere and typing and such. I currently have three buttons stuck in the middle of their two positions, textboxes being broken, etc. It needs work.

Also it's rarely a good thing if your goddamn landing page makes an i3 stutter when rendering it. Doesn't really scream lightweight or efficient (although the biggest culprit is that background header video)


However, Semantic.gs is pretty good. Minimal and much more semantic.


Glad to hear you enjoy using it. Skeleton seems to work well for those just getting started with front end or want something extremely simple.

Cheers!


"I’m not an entrepreneur. I’m not a CEO. I’m a nerdy computer programmer who likes to have opinions on Twitter...If I ever accidentally make something that seems to gain traction, I’ll probably abandon it immediately."

I have the utmost respect for notch after reading that.


I think it's sad to write something like that (abandoning something as soon as it seems to gain traction). Isn't that what games are about? Writing great games that a lot of people love to play and talk about? And in the case of Minecraft, hack and mod in unimaginable ways?


Perhaps the joy he derives comes not from the popularity or world-changingness, but rather from the process of creation, or the problems that he gets to solve in interesting ways.

I don't think he'll ever be at a loss for creativity. If he spends the rest of his days streaming (or not streaming!) him coding random small games, or tinkering on a renderer that is never used, I expect that he'll be happy and feel fulfilled.


I don't like his attitude in the public eye but at least he's self aware and not afraid to say it. That does take courage.


Same. He's my type of hacker. The best type.


If you build something you love, chances are someone else will love it, too. If you use something you love, chances are someone else will love it to. Incremental things that we love can spread like wild fire (Facebook, Twitter, and reddit), and they have changed the world; further incremental products will likely do so, too.

...An interesting discussion is whether these things we love make the world a better place. Another interesting discussion is if engineers and entrepreneurs focus too much on the things we love instead of the things the world needs.


Yes. It's easy to argue that Facebook has changed the world, but that's not inherently good or worthwhile.

We could stand to pay more attention to direction of the impact, not just the magnitude.


Any news regarding Surface 3 RT?

RT's lackluster sales and noticeable absence from this announcement makes me think Microsoft could be narrowing focus to just x86 versions of Windows going forward.


They said nothing about RT so I think you are right and the main focus will be on full win8 experience with Intel for what is related to 12'screens. For the smaller I think RT can be still part of microsoft strategy, at least to fight in the low price market zone.


RT seems to be a better fit for the rumored 8" device. I imagine Microsoft is attempting to reconcile RT on smaller devices and Windows Phone on larger devices (phablets).

Microsoft is well positioned to combine RT with Windows Phone, I'm guessing 2 years out?


One of the greatest features is the ability to change your focus point AFTER you shoot. This is huge.


Kind of like an all-software Lytro https://www.lytro.com/


As long as the original photo was sharp.


There are rumors that Microsoft is considering the purchase of Xamarin [1]. And now Microsoft is now previewing their .NET AOT compiler for X64 and ARM. I see great things in C#/.NET's future in mobile and cross platform development.

On another note, I wonder if Microsoft addressed the inherent limitations of AOT in C# [2]. I wonder if it's a compile-time error, or if that segment of code is interpreted. I doubt it's interpreted, as that's a giant perf loss.

[1] http://www.wpcentral.com/microsoft-reportedly-considering-ac...

[2] http://www.mono-project.com/AOT#Limitation:_Generic_Interfac...


If MS buy Xamarin then it'll be a fantastic validation for a team that was dumped by Novell not so long ago.

I'm also very excited about the idea of getting back into C# again. I always loved the language, but moved away from the .NET stack. Here's hoping.


Still rumor and I don't expect to see anything on that front for some time. Why buy the cow when the milk is free, not like Xamarin is flirting with enabling Java on iOS or something - they are sold out to C#/F# so Microsoft is reaping the benefit.

More evidence, Xamarin announced their Evolve conference dates, times and prices and when it goes on sale - if Microsoft were buying them they would hold off on letting several thousand people spend thousands of dollars for a dev conference that would later be tantamount to a bait and switch.


Are they even still rumors? I thought that had been announced.


This seems to be the sole source of those rumors:

http://www.crn.com/news/mobility/300072056/sources-microsoft...

"Microsoft is in the final stages of negotiations that could lead to either an acquisition or major investment in Xamarin, sources with knowledge of the discussions told CRN recently."

The article is from march 17th and there doesn't seem to be anything newer.


To my knowledge it's a rumor.


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