[HN Gopher] The Night Watch [pdf] (2013)
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The Night Watch [pdf] (2013)
Author : isaiahwp
Score : 160 points
Date : 2024-12-17 11:29 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (scholar.harvard.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (scholar.harvard.edu)
| Moomoomoo309 wrote:
| This is my favorite tech article. It's satirical, it's witty,
| it's dense, and it's memorable. James Mickens truly outdid
| himself with this one - his other works are great, too, but this
| one is a cut above the rest!
| stogot wrote:
| I read another by him but didn't realize that he has a series!
| These are great
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > One time I tried to create a list<map<int>>, and my syntax
| errors caused the dead to walk among the living.
|
| yeah coffee is a heck of a drug ;-)
| moron4hire wrote:
| Older C++ compilers couldn't distinguish between a right-shift
| operator and the closing of multiple template parameter lists,
| but few people figured out you just had to put spaces between
| all those >s.
| Thorrez wrote:
| The old C++ language specification said you needed a space.
| C++11 changed that, saying you don't need a space.
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/a/15785583
| moron4hire wrote:
| In 2005, I didn't know anyone who could afford a copy of
| the specification. My point was that many of the other C++
| programmers I knew at the time assumed it wasn't possible
| to nestedly use type parameters, so they just avoided it.
| I'm sure there were probably a cryptic error message and
| several toxic message board communities involved, too.
| frutiger wrote:
| The problem is that map requires two template parameters and
| not just one.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Anything written by James Mickens is worth your time.
| tptacek wrote:
| I like him a lot. He's kind of doing a Dave Barry thing, right?
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I've never read Dave Barry so I don't know. If you're seeing
| a similarity, though, that's enough of a recommendation to
| make me give Barry a look.
|
| The magic of Mickens, for me, is his weaving in Comp-Sci (or
| Comp-Sci adjacent) elements in dense prose causally,
| punctuating it with absurdity, and then running with that
| absurdity. Knowing that he's bringing knowledge and
| experience I'll likely never achieve while making it look
| effortless makes me really respect his ability.
| pjmorris wrote:
| I was introduced to Dave Barry through his 'Year in Review'
| parody of the year's events (back when it came in print in
| the 'Tropic' magazine included in the Sunday Miami Herald.)
| I laughed and laughed, the way a Bill Bryson book might
| make you laugh.
|
| He once borrowed the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile [1] to pick
| his son up from school.
|
| And my wife is so used to my using one of his tropes, 'That
| would make a great name for a rock band', [2] that she has
| started predicting when I'm about to say it ('Feral
| chihuahuas' was the subject, but that's TMI.)
|
| [1] https://www.oscarmayer.com/wienermobile/
|
| [2] https://www.davebarry.com/gg/rockband.html
| dmoy wrote:
| His one about threat models[1] was hilarious and also scarily
| prescient. Specifically
|
| > If the Mossad wants your data, they're going to use a drone
| to replace your cellphone with a piece of uranium that's shaped
| like a cellphone, and when you die of tumors filled with
| tumors, they're going to hold a press conference and say "It
| wasn't us" as they wear t-shirts that say "IT WAS DEFINITELY
| US," and then they're going to buy all of your stuff at your
| estate sale so that they can directly look at the photos of
| your vacation instead of reading your insipid emails about
| them.
|
| Maybe not the "wants your data" part, but the whole pagers-are-
| actually-bombs thing.
|
| [1]This World of Ours, pdf:
| https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf
| whatshisface wrote:
| The Mossad/Not Mossad duality is a funny idea, but it isn't
| true. The NSA doesn't send replacement cellphones to millions
| of US citizens, they scrape unencrypted data.
|
| They're not going to use a quantum computer on you, if they
| have one. They're going to embed your emails into a vector
| space that they can project your sentiment out of.
| dmoy wrote:
| I mean it's not literally mossad / not-mossad
|
| It's <state-actor-you-basically-can't-stop> / <mostly-just-
| need-to-do-simple-stuff>
|
| Mossad is just a particular type of the first set
| whatshisface wrote:
| That's the false duality. NSA cannot "be stopped," but
| they don't use every tool they have available on every
| mission. When conducting foreign intelligence operations
| against high-value targets they will use 0days you can't
| secure against. When they're unconstitutionally
| surveiling _you_ they 'll use http and a large language
| model. Your inalienable rights are going to be violated
| by a deal with Google Cloud, not a quantum computer, or
| even a kernel bug.
|
| In this context, the purpose of tools like "five way
| secret sharing" is to communicate in a way that can't be
| broken without revealing the existence of the 0days and
| exceptions to the judicial process by using them on a
| hundred million citizens at once. The threat model is a
| lot of very smart engineers who can passively listen to
| anything that gets sent over the internet, not Perry the
| Platypus.
| isaacdl wrote:
| If you enjoy this essay, you might also enjoy another classic,
| "Typing the technical interview"[0] by Aphyr (a.k.a. Kyle
| Kingsbury, the person behind Jepsen[1] distributed systems
| tests.)
|
| [0] https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview
|
| [1] https://jepsen.io/
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Ah, I've never seen this, but I instantly related it to its
| predecessor, https://aphyr.com/posts/341-hexing-the-technical-
| interview, which now I see is linked to and is by the same
| person.
|
| "Magic numbers." You are, after all, a witch. "Every class
| begins with a babe, in a cafe."
|
| I like writing that is still fun and interesting to read even
| when you don't understand what is being done, and then if you
| do understand what is being done, it's even more entertainingly
| weird.
| dunham wrote:
| Therein I learned that "Haskell is a dynamically-typed,
| interpreted language".
|
| I've seen it said that Haskell type class resolution is
| essentially prolog, but this drives the point home well.
| thefaux wrote:
| > The systems programmer has read the kernel source, to better
| understand the deep ways of the universe, and the systems
| programmer has seen the comment in the scheduler that says "DOES
| THIS WORK LOL," and the systems programmer has wept instead of
| LOLed
|
| Chef's kiss.
| flir wrote:
| > Pointers are real. They're what the hardware understands.
| Somebody has to deal with them. You can't just place a LISP
| book on top of an x86 chip and hope that the hardware learns
| about lambda calculus by osmosis.
|
| Yessssss.
| p_l wrote:
| meanwhile common lisp: "actually has concept of pointers,
| just called differently", "invites low-level assembly reading
| by integrating disassembler and compiler" :V
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _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)
| dnlserrano wrote:
| damn, so good
| jcgrillo wrote:
| Another absolute gem: https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/tenure-
| announcement
| kbenson wrote:
| I'm horrible with names, so didn't recognize Mickens at first,
| but when I saw his picture on the paper I realized that I went
| through a binge of his public talks a few years back because he's
| such a great speaker. If you enjoy Bryan Cantrill giving talks,
| you'll like Mickens.
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| > I need to prepare for the end times,
|
| In the post apocalyptic world, what information do you take with
| you? A copy of wikipedia and a LLM? You get a laptop computer,
| maybe a 2023 macbook Pro m3, and find an array of solar panels.
| However, you lost your charger running from the radioactive
| zombies so you have to MacGyver it with 6 hours of charge left.
| What did you bring with you and how do you solve this?
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