uudecode

It's possible to shake off OpenVPN and TLS without shaking off use of tun/tap. I use a tun/tap based "VPN" (overlay) and I quite like it. One could even add NaCl to it if they were so inclined.

I sometimes think Apple removed /dev/tap from iOS because it provided too much potential freedom.

Not every user needs in-kernel performance for their daily routine but there's certainly an argument that every user could use a decent "VPN" that could run on all their computers.

Alas, OpenVPN mindshare is rather strong, to the detriment of existing or future userspace alternatives.

Here's another solution, a little better than rlwrap:

  socat readline,history=file exec:q

"Nothing stops you..."

Except my lack of creativity using k at this point.

Thanks for this.

As a k noob, I wonder: is thinking of solutions using iteration and control structures a bad habit, at least until I have command of the rest of the language?

Currently I'm using recordio to save my sessions; crude, but it works well enough:

  recordio q 2>log

What if someone took c.c, k.h, linenoise.c and linenoise.h and made a tiny k4 REPL for UNIX with commandline history?

Would the k community appreciate this as useful, pragmatic solution?

I am a BSD /emul/linux, /bin/sh, vi-mode, ESC / user. I need searchable commandline history for q)k) and I really do not like rlwrap as a solution.

sources:

http://kx.com/q/c/c/ http://raw.githubusercontent.com/antirez/linenoise/master/li... http://raw.githubusercontent.com/antirez/linenoise/master/li...

I know that capstone, keystone and unicorn are marketed to the "security community" but these projects are some of the most promising I've seen for programming in general, e.g., for the few people who still might want to write small, simple (and fast) programs that run on multiple architectures.

Great work.

(This project relies on keystone and capstone.)

Silly question: Historically, did anyone ever attempt to create the APL primitives as separate utilities? The crazy idea that keeps recurring in my mind is that one could have a UNIX userland made of APL primitives. k's mmap approach, avoiding I/O, is preferable. But even if one used a named pipe or UNIX socket to do IPC, perhaps it could still be fast enough to be useful or fun. Feel free to dismiss this idea, but please kindly explain why it would not work.

The AS Macroassembler by Alfred Arnold (1992) still compiles on the unpopular OS I'm using, with a quick edit to sysdefs.h.

What do you think of SRS?

Easier: Add /amp before /articles. (This has been posted on HN before.)

In fact, "amphtml" is the first link on the page. Follow this link to see the full article.

However the /amp URL does not retrieve comments like the URL you posted.

Where does the lMyQjAxMTA2NzEyNzAxNDc5Wj come from?

Fortunately the two approaches are not mutually exclusive. There are no rules about how the "distributed Web" must be constructed. As the old saying goes, there's more than one way to do it.

I think there's a lot of historical evidence over the last few thousand years that people naturally form small communities, or at least small groups within large communities.

Today, people can, in theory, choose from among billions of peers to form these small groups. And the groups can if they so choose connect with each other, via a network of networks.

This internet "connects billions of people". True. But your company's LAN probably does not connect that many.

If a user started creating numerous fake identities on the LAN, then it's likely she would be detected.

Is it possible to create distributed "LANs" over the internet? (rhetorical question)

Another commenter questioned why a distributed Web needs "lack of trust".

People in small groups can and do trust each other. No computers are needed to make this happen.

Sybil attacks do not work in small communities that members may choose to form where the members already know each other.

If a system forces all users to be part of some large, Borg-like, distributed hash table, or ledger, then by my definition it's not "fully decentralized".

"To be honest, they're probably buying the users, not the product."

I thought the same when they invested in "Facebook" and gave some kid with a website 17M or so.

And then when they overpaid for Skype.

I would not say "probably" any more. They are buying users. Maybe it's the only way they can stay in the game.

Older computers are getting more valuable ever day.

AWS is fine as long as... you do not want to control it with shell scripts and without a large scripting language.

(No Perl, Python, Ruby, Go, etc.)

I tried this when I first experimented with AWS after I read the story behind it, i.e., the directive Bezos allegedly gave to disparate groups within Amazon to make their data stores accessible to each other.

The AWS documentation claimed everything could be controlled via HTTP. Great. I know HTTP. Sign me up.

I have no trouble interacting with servers via HTTP using the Bourne shell and UNIX utilities, without using large scripting languages. I have been doing so for many years.

But after a few hours trying to get AWS to work using UNIX it was such a PITA I gave up. And I do not give up easily.

But it turned out there were small errors in the documentation, so even if one followed their specification to the letter, things still would not work.

The Amazon developers in the help forums would just say use the Java programs they had written.

Of course AMZN had a "web interface" from Day 1. But I have little interest in another hosting company with a web GUI.

At the time all Amazon offered for anyone interested in the command line was Java. Installing OpenJDK and a hefty set of "Java command line tools" just to send HTTP requests? This did not inspire confidence.

Then came Python. Everyone loves AWS. How can anyone criticize it?

I concluded that if AWS was well-designed (according to Bezos alleged directive) then it would be possible to interact with it without having to use a large scripting language and various libraries.

I guess I am either too stupid or I set the bar too high.

AWS, as I understood it back then (before the massive growth), is a wonderful idea but I am not sure the implementation was/is as wonderful as the idea.

This is common not just in Intel chips but in all electronics.

Instead of making several versions, each with with more features, only one version is made that contains all possible features.

Whether they are turned on or off is what correlates with the "model" and the price.

Turn features off and sell as "basic" model. Turn features on and sell as "pro" model.

In this story, turning on features correlates with whether the customer has deep pockets and consistently buys in large quantities.

Generally, do development boards have ME, too?

FreeBSD. Got it. But not OpenBSD, NetBSD, or Solaris. Interesting how even with a relatively simple utility like tr, changes were made.

That's GNU, I'm guessing. BSD is a little different.

Negative coding. Eliminate cruft. Drop "features". Go small. Stop modifying the same program to do more. Finish.

Open to interpretation but that's my take. You use the word "elegance" and I think that's the idea. Alas, software usually does not "evolve" toward elegance.

tr -h | wc

This post is about more than emacs/vi. HN title should be renamed "Unix taste" because that is the subject line.

I wish more programmers thought like McIlroy. Good taste is rare in programming. He has it.

Call me cynical but I say this is doubtful. Microsoft will probably buy it and kill it. Or the QNX patents will go to a NPE ("patent troll").

Other opinions welcome. Here's mine:

LAN parties were implementations "instant messaging", "VOIP","video conferencing" and maybe some other things I'm omitting. Before these things even had a "market".

Gamers solved all these challenges when the web was still a blatently crude hack and the internet was dog slow by today's standards.

Then they successfully and reliably pierced NAT to play games over the internet. Even when the internet was painfully slow. Before Napster, before Bittorrent, before Kazaa/Skype, etc.

Others outside of gaming seemed to be struggling with coming up with solutions for these basic but obviously valuable "services". There is a wasteland of failed/abandoned "VOIP" projects from the 90's that still boggles my mind.

Except for some well-funded research labs, gamers did it first. LAN over internet. (Ethernet frames in UDP packets.) It might be ugly to some people, but it does work.

Now, I will let you all tell me how my opinion is misinformed.

Not sure about "original" as in AT&T, but certainly lots of files going back to the 80's and 90's. Lots of Sun's legacy to be found.

"It was designed to make it easy to write quick, "one-off" programs in C."

OK, so it just so happens this is what I love to do. I like writing small programs and continually trying to improve them.

So I guess I should be a UNIX user?

Is NT not good for this too?

BTW, I do like VMS. But despite the NT kernel, using NT feels nothing like using VMS.

"... so its system calls are going to be necessarily more complicated."

Are you implying that an increase in "power" can never be achieved through increasing simplicity?

Did the authors benchmark against kdb?

e.g., run a single k interpeter on each CPU, then divide and conquer

Isn't it faster to do parsing in memory and avoid I/O wherever possible?

I regularly use non-printable ASCII characters as delimiters. I just confirm first that they are not in the input. I am going to start using the ones you mentioned. This solution is one I rarely if ever see used. The other solution which I have seen in practice is to encode the comma character. The problem really IMO is that people who make CSV place no limits on what range of characters is stored in the tables. Certain characters can safely be removed. In most cases the input is still comprehensible without commas. Commas can be deleted, freeing up their use exclusively as record separators.

Is it not OK to criticize Microsoft on HN? This title was changed to remove any mention of Windows. Just curious.