CUR10US

Sometimes I don't want to fork, e.g., if there's nothing waiting for input, e.g., the last program in a pipe.

prog |prog |exec prog

The usual way to do this is to put it in a shell script, then run the shell script. Though it would be nice in some instances, you can't run exec from a shell prompt or you'll exit the shell. I was thinking that if I'm in the kona console, executed from a parent shell, then I could type exec from the console and run programs without forking, because it's not going to cause kona to exit. Wishful thinking.

To stop forking, you would have to add an option to call execve() instead of system() in the kona source.

I meant fork(2). Maybe edit the source to optionally use execve?

Interesting to read the comments. They should just rewrite the C resolver library for UNIX. Let's face it, the Plan 9^W^WGo team would probably produce a more elegant result than what we're using now, which has had its share of bugs over the years.

How to avoid forking?

kona

I use it as my shell.

Has anyone read the motion (available from an economist.com server)? This what the Rolling Stone article is based on.

Is the issue whether and how GS makes money from the practice of naked short selling? Maybe the issue is that feeding the market with info about short sales that are never actually cleared (but which the market assumes will be cleared), can destroy the value of a company's stock.

Obviously if you can sell something without ever having to own or deliver it (is that really a sale?), you can do a lot of selling; and you can exert considerable influence on the market for a stock.

Maybe what happened here is a company, Overstock, believes they got screwed by naked short selling.

I need to read the motion to get a better idea of what happened.

You mean the Go tools have their own resolver?

The blog at miek.nl says that Go had a DNS library written in Go in the provided samples for a while, then they removed it. It would be interesting to know why.

"The best solution is not to need money."

"The startups that really get hosed are going to be the ones... that pay little attention to profitability."

Mirror replies: That's a tough question, Nathan, because you just keep creating new ones. No single company can accumulate that much hate and they can't be easily linked to a single source. Disperse the hate. I must admit, you are one clever guy.

Should the public have the right to see the full details of "fails"?

The SEC website says disclosing this info would put firms like GS at a competitive disadvantage.

But someone has to know which sales cleared and which did not.

How can we accurately set a market price for something based on historical sales data that may in part be false (i.e. sales that were never cleared)?

Patents don't troll. People do. For example, people who run companies, like the shell companies IV incorporates.

It's not the patent that reveals trolling. Rather, what indicates trolling are the actions of the person running the company that controls the patent.

Perhaps I am misunderstanding your question.

I remember reading that thread some time ago. Are you the engineer who was rude to the journalist?

"after much deliberation".

Why did the team deliberate so much?

I will let the readers ponder this.

There are already some very good stub resolvers and resolver libraries available to users (e.g. dnsqr and the djbdns library). I have a hard time believing Google is going to do better than djb.

Of course I have no problem with them or anyone else writing another one. Have at it. The more attention brought to name resolution the better -- because it can be so easily abused for questionable purposes, it is something that deserves user oversight.

But why does Google need to place theirs _inside the browser_? That is a very curious design decision.

"after much deliberation the <bold>Chrome team is now experimenting with building its own DNS resolver</bold>"

With all due respect, I think you have missed the point.

You are right, of course. Perhaps I momentarily forgot the context. I am reading his words on HN, not listening to them at a commencement. Big difference.

I confess I have not read Moneyball. I mistook it as the work of a baseball fan and not a metaphor for something more than an appreciation for baseball. My mistake.

It's time for me to read it.

Perhaps we could draw it as the difference between "would pay" and "paid".

You can put a price on something, but until someone has paid it, it seems difficult to argue that the thing is "worth" your price... to anyone. But people routinely argue this, and others believe them.

Getting out of dodge.

Maybe this is why he was brief: His point is a potentially unpopular one.

It is just a very interesting topic. One that few who are successful would dare to explore in depth.

It would be interesting to hear how his brief remarks were received. Did people like what he had to say?

Can you quote the portion of the article where it says he sat next to the wife of a Goldman employee?

Anything that cannot boot from USB, SD card, or some externally connected media, should be approached with caution.

If you can boot from external media, then generally you can dual boot. Someone may have to show you how to prepare media for booting, but it's quite easy once you have been shown. Today's PC's all seem to have good support for booting from external media. Are we going to see this removed in ARM devices?

You do not have to shop for devices that have an "open" bootloader. You have to shop for devices that can boot from external media. (For today's PC's, that's quite easy.) If you have a device that can boot from external media, we can show how to do the rest.

Did Lewis work at Goldman? Have you read Liar's Poker? How are you qualified to comment on his career?

"This isn't just false humility. It's false humility with a point."

This is why I like Lewis' writing. Liar's Poker had a huge influence on me at an influential age.

There's always a sense that he's playing the same game that he's writing about. And not in a George Plimpton sense. But he's often got a message to deliver that other players will not touch. The message always seems worth hearing.

I interpret his reference to the Berkeley study as not one that explains "luck", but of one that explains how life is role-based. People take roles and play them, as if "all the world's a stage". It is. We are all willing to go along either as the audience or in our appointed roles. What I think Lewis means to say is that the assignment of roles, the "casting" if you will, is often arbitrary.

I only wish Lewis had made this longer. There is so much more to say. Not only do people not like success explained as "luck" but they insist on success being attributed to "brilliance", "genius", "hard work", etc. In this case, when the cause of an effect is not clear, we are very quick to find one that suits our purposes.

What is dll/dependency hell?

Ask: How is the patent being used?

If the patent holder is not manufacturing a product but is threatening to sue others based on the patent, it's trolling.

IV manufactures nothing. However, through shell corporations, they threaten to sue others. This motivates their targets to participate in the IV pools and IV takes a cut.

This idea of threatening enforcement where the patent holder has no intent to ever manufacture is not something new. But no one ever liked it when it happened. That's because it serves no apparent purpose in bringing products to the market.

What makes IV unique is that Myrvold used his own money to start IV and start acquiring patents from patent holders in bulk. This was no small investment. His idea is to make trolling a business. Instead of trying to fix a problem, he has opted to exacerbate it for his own profit. He is engaging in exactly the type of conduct companies like the one he worked for had to be in constant fear of: the small inventor who will never be successful in the marketplace but who has received some patents that she can, at her discretion, enforce against some large companies that are successful in the marketplace.

For an interesting approach to how patents might be used, consult the history of Hans Bessemer. He produced some of the most valuable intellectual property in America's history. He made Carnegie the world's wealthiest individual.

Also, note that Paul Allen, one of the wealthiest men on the planet, tried some pure patent trolling a number of years ago. Why? He failed miserably. But what drives someone to try this?

"In another 50 would you expect Apple or Exxon to still be near the top of the list?"

Well, maybe it depends on who is supplying power to the world, including, e.g., supplying the power to run Apple gadgets and Apple datacenters. Chances are it's still going to be Exxon.

He mentions running out of memory addresses when there's still ample physical memory available.

The obvious thought is: We need to create more addressable space to take advantage of this plentiful physical memory.

The less obvious thought is: Given that we have such plentiful physical memory, why are we using an old hack that was designed for a problem that no longer exists?[1] The name of the problem: Not enough physical memory to keep processes in their own space. The name of the hack: Shared memory and dynamic linking.

1. Of course, we can keep making software larger and more resource intensive to perpetuate the problem and thus justify the ongoing use of the solution (shared memory). A comparative example might be disk space. We have so much disk space that we can keep making files larger (e.g. programs, operating systems, document/media files, data collection) to justify a need for more space.

Commence downvoting.

API's? C'mon.

Bulk data.

Agree with polemic.

I love the amasci website (I don't mean the design; I have no idea about what it looks like in a graphical browser; I only mean what there is to read- lots of text! I just extract the text for viewing on 80x25). If only all websites could have this much information density. Long live sites like amasci!

djb once wrote a FORTH implementation for the IOCC. It would be cool to get it running under current BSD/Linux/Solaris.

Arthur Whitney is another I would put on par with djb. He's a bit older than djb.

For expertise you can't beat W. Richard Stevens. He also studies and wrote about FORTH before focusing on solely on C.

Both Whitney and djb have a true appreciation for speed, efficiency and succinctness; both have solid foundations in maths; both can build very level abstractions. But they have different areas of focus.

djb - secure systems administration and networking. (Stevens - documentation.) Whitney - Lisp background; big data.

Whitney has proven that it's possible, using a matrix-based approach, to meet or beat the speed of C with an interpreted language.

But it's difficult to write UNIX systems or networking code without knowing C. For guidance on navigating the many pitfalls of C, djb and Stevens are as good as it gets.

Yes, same functionality. I only meant the implementation, the code. Let's take an example: The APL and APL-related languages. IBM and some other old companies have been licensing these "languages" for many years. But what are people really licensing? Not the language. If we agree that languages are not protectatble, then no one needs permission to use a language. (What the licensee is really paying for is the use of an interpreter and perhaps support/consulting.) But how many programmers understand this distinction?