HN user
Also perhaps worth mentioning Baserock (http://wiki.baserock.org) which can reproducibly build an OS from sources in git and deploy the resulting artifact to various popular targets, kvm, virtualbox, openstack etc.
I personally felt that the "What killed the Linux Desktop" article was completely irrelevant.
It seems there's always going to be some people who complain that GNU/Linux isn't 'good enough' or whatever, and as a community we should simply ignore these people.
For what it's worth, GNU/Linux never really was about some desktop conquest, so this whole discussion "What killed the Linux desktop" is quite absurd.
That aside, what we have here is a thread apparently devoted to shitting on the work of people who built something for fun and gave it away for free.
Good job folks!
Going into my final year at Edinburgh uni, studying Comp Sci.
I've always felt that I'm not nearly as talented as the folks around me, however I've loved computers since I was 10, I'm still in love and I'm always writing programs.
Ever since I realized I'm not the most talented at comp sci (mainly the mathematics) I've had problems with my self-esteem. As such, I find this article incredibly comforting. Thank you!
Yeah, because ice cream the sky and the sea are things I experience once in a blue moon... pretty sure I see the sky everyday, eat ice cream most hot days and I live by the coast, so...
In any case, those were obviously examples, like I need to argue why life is awesome...
If you don't want to discuss it on HN, then don't post to HN...
Sorry, what?
Life is awesome, the sky, the sea, ice cream - all of it. I'm only sorry that I don't get to stay here longer.
Sure we suffer sometimes, and some people suffer more than others. But to insist that we stop reproducing in an attempt to end human life just to avoid pain...
And as for purpose, find your own purpose.
On the other hand when I criticized Chris Granger's "LightTable" I was told that I was a "hater" followed by several statements suggesting that Chris should ignore folks like myself: the "haters".
So I'm not sure, perhaps it is more about who you are than what you say. In any case, I have noted the general fall in quality of articles here, but, there's still some interesting stuff now and again... c'est la vie!
Been dabbling with OS stuff for a while now, looking at xv6 sources and using Tanenbaum's Minix book.
Have got to say I'm very excited about this site, it looks incredibly useful.
I'm not familiar enough with Clojure to comment.
I'm not sure about others, but I wouldn't give my money to any software project that didn't describe in detail how it might overcome such glaring design challenges.
Also even if the code were indeed based on just basic numerical or string primitives, how would the 'instant feedback' work if the code were in a long, tight loop or did heavy cpu intensive stuff?
I think this is a critical point, has the author of LightTable considered what would happen with instant feedback for less trivial pieces of code?
Besides that, I think this critique is fair, because honestly when I saw LightTable, it seemed like smoke and mirrors. I have a friend quietly writing an innovative new text editor, I expect it will be more 'ground-breaking' than LightTable, but I don't see him trying to take everybody's money.
Sure, I just get the feeling that you're lucky to find such jobs (jobs where you can do what you love and still love doing it).
This article is a wake up call, thank you.
As a student taking a CS degree for fun, I think the 'Happy Hacking' article is fairly insightful. Not of the best quality, perhaps, but insightful none the less.
The title seems pretty misleading: it seems they only built an AND and an OR gate, I wouldn't really call a couple of logic gates a Computer.
Still, building logic gates using crabs, very good. :)
Techno's nice, but I prefer this kind of thing for when I'm making something.
I think most people probably don't care so much about karma, since it doesn't really mean an awful lot.
However, getting negative karma hurts, for some reason. Often if I'm down voted, I assume I've done something wrong and either try to fix my comment or remove it altogether.
I hope no one down votes this comment down just to see if I remove it. :)
Debian Stable since 2009, before then I used other Linux distros and Windows.
I'll admit I was quite a fan boy in my teens, but now I really just use Debian because it's what I'm used to, or most comfortable with.
I think GNU/Linux in general is a fantastic development environment.
I'm 21, 5 years and counting; I still don't know how to program.
I don't buy this, I spent the first two years of my degree working as this guy suggests and completely burnt myself out. Now I take things easy, I'm still getting good grades and I'm a lot more relaxed. The other things I want to learn (not covered in my degree) can wait.
But... maybe I'm just a chump...
I couldn't agree more, I can't imagine how much more I could have picked up at that young age if I'd just had, say, a tty, instead of endlessly playing with window themes, notification sounds and so on.
Another thing that's important though, you need to be able to make the computer do fun things pretty easily, otherwise you'll (as a kid) loose interest.
Damn, how on earth do I do a poll then?
So, do guys wear shorts to draw attention to their legs or because it's more comfortable?
Because it's more comfortable.
So, maybe it's possible that a woman might wear a low cut dress because it's more comfortable?
It's bizarre, I'm sure if I made any of those comments to women at university I would quickly become pretty unpopular.
So is this just a problem of the previous generation or a problem specific to the workplace?
I really do feel for the author, I can't imagine how awful it must be to put up with that kind of thing everyday.
"Start wearing sweaters, even though my breasts feel like they're boiling in there (yup, that's one reason women like low tops, guys)?"
Why is this a petition?
Eclipse has so many useful features for Java, and once you get used to it it's really not as bad as some people say it is.
For any other language I just use gedit where I add line numbers, automatic indentation, current line highlighting, syntax highlighting and word completion.
I've been happily using the stable branch of Debian for about 4 years now. Whilst I agree bureaucracy and politics should be avoided where possible, it seems to me that handing everything off to a 3rd party to focus on the "core packages" harms overall system performance.
Time and again I hear people in the lab complain about all these bugs in their applications, running Debian I can honestly say I don't have this problem. Ofcourse, I don't have the latest software either, but for me that's the price I pay for a stable system.
"The option of being unfailingly polite really doesn't exist. Nobody will trust somebody who is so clearly hiding his true character."
What if you don't know your "true character" How are you supposed to behave then?
Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works?