The Night Watch (2013) [pdf]

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf

by mifydev • 1 year ago

205 33 1 year ago

mifydev2• 1 year ago

Years go by, but I always find myself getting back to this article, it's just the true essence of systems programming.

bigstrat2003• 1 year ago

In 2020, my pandemic hobby project was learning to write a kernel in Rust (instead of sourdough like everyone else). Around that time, I read this essay for the first time. It was one of the funniest things I had ever read, because it hit me at the right time in my life to appreciate how true it was. An absolute gem.

bitbasher• 1 year ago

His talk at Monitorama was great-- one of the most entertaining talks around!

listenfaster• 1 year ago

This made me so happy. Too many good quotes.

dang• 1 year ago

Related. Others?

The Night Watch [pdf] (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42440496 - Dec 2024 (28 comments)

The Night Watch (2013) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41219779 - Aug 2024 (1 comment)

The Night Watch (2013) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34522845 - Jan 2023 (35 comments)

The Night Watch (2013) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19289353 - March 2019 (10 comments)

The Night Watch (2013) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16188538 - Jan 2018 (1 comment)

The Night Watch (2013) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13954077 - March 2017 (33 comments)

The Night Watch [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12490689 - Sept 2016 (2 comments)

The Night Watch (2013) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9671020 - June 2015 (21 comments)

The Night Watch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6741804 - Nov 2013 (3 comments)

The Night Watch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6735980 - Nov 2013 (3 comments)

mifydev2• 1 year ago

Oh, I didn’t know it was posted as recently as December, I just stumbled upon this again and assumed maybe not a lot of people have seen this recently

bigiain2• 1 year ago

He's _such_ a great writer/speaker. It's totally worth reposting him every 3 month.

I think this is my favourite piece of his, "This world of ours":

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf

bigfishrunning• 1 year ago

This is the first time i've seen it, so you got one! thanks!

halifaxbeard• 1 year ago

At the beginning of my career, I merely found it funny.

Now I find it relatable.

(don't install a signal handler in Python for SIGSEGV, especially if it's being triggered by C you're calling)

xena• 1 year ago

Honestly I hope to be able to write something like this at some point in my career. This is the kind of satire that comes from deep expertise, passion, and desire for the future generations to not repeat the mistakes you have made. This is one of the best articles of all time.

twp• 1 year ago

This is, without doubt, the greatest sequence of words on programming ever committed to magnetic storage.

NotYourLawyer• 1 year ago

Mickens always cracks me up. His writing style is a little overdone though.

itronitron• 1 year ago

Yeah, I'm surprised and relieved that they haven't set off to write their own OS.

dharmab• 1 year ago

I think that's kind of what he did at MSFT, but now he's a tenured professor at Harvard.

wffurr• 1 year ago

His latest project is a heavy metal tribute album to himself by himself, made on sabbatical: https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens

titanomachy• 1 year ago

I’m inspired by this on so many levels. What a renaissance man.

I warn you! This music is not for the faint of heart. Despite my lack of sound mixing experience, vocal training, or general common sense, I have created a poignant distillation of the human condition.

maxwelljoslyn• 1 year ago

Man, when I thought I couldn't like this dude any more for his writing... What a fabulous drongo.

npodbielski• 1 year ago

Nice! This is so cool even it sounds so bad! :D Would love to have a beer with this guy.

jdougan• 1 year ago

My hobby: asking LLMs to write essays "in the style of James Mickens"

example:

    > Write a paragraph on spaghetti carbonara the style of James Mickens.

    > Ah, carbonara. A dish of such deceptive simplicity, it's practically a quantum singularity of culinary hubris. You think, "Eggs, cheese, guanciale, pasta? Child's play!" But

    > only reward is a fleeting moment of eggy, peppery, salty bliss before the next inevitable thermodynamic collapse.

kurisufag• 1 year ago

bleh. i don't mind in principle having robots do art and writing for us, but their chronic inability to be properly cynical stains everything they produce. it's all "big bang theory" flavored, for lack of a better phrase.

HeliumHydride• 1 year ago

The obvious solution is to create a robot capable of feeling pain and dread.

Macha• 1 year ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajGX7odA87k

If only James Mickens had shared his thoughts on AI somewhere...

fergie• 1 year ago

"if you find yourself drinking a martini and writing programs in garbage-collected, object-oriented Esperanto, be aware that the only reason that the Esperanto runtime works is because there are systems people who have exchanged any hope of losing their virginity for the exciting opportunity to think about hex numbers and their relationships with the operating system, the hardware, and ancient blood rituals that Bjarne Stroustrup performed at Stonehenge"

So true, so funny.

Also, this article subtly conveys the experience of being a working class immigrant at a top academic institution (something that I relate hard to)

RustyRussell• 1 year ago

I actually laughed out loud. But my wife would not understand...

reportgunner• 1 year ago

From the headline I thought this was going to be about night watch the book[0] (I have only seen the movies)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Watch_(Lukyanenko_novel)

jonathanlydall• 1 year ago

I don't recall much about the movie, except that I enjoyed it at the time, but I was wondering if the title had a relationship to a different book[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Watch_(Discworld)

Applejinx• 1 year ago

And I was wondering about the painting[0] that inspired the King Crimson song…

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Watch

The Night Watch (2013) [pdf]

Related Stories