[HN Gopher] The Night Watch (2013) [pdf]
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The Night Watch (2013) [pdf]
Author : mifydev
Score : 186 points
Date : 2025-03-12 21:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.usenix.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.usenix.org)
| mifydev wrote:
| Years go by, but I always find myself getting back to this
| article, it's just the true essence of systems programming.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| His talk at Monitorama was great-- one of the most entertaining
| talks around!
| listenfaster wrote:
| This made me so happy. Too many good quotes.
| dang wrote:
| 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)
| mifydev wrote:
| 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
| bigiain wrote:
| 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
| dcminter wrote:
| I thinkbhe's a better writer than speaker, but I suspect if
| I'd seen him speak first I'd have it the other way around.
|
| I love all his Usenix articles and they always cheer me up
| if I'm having a grumpy day at work.
| bigiain wrote:
| For me, acknowledging that:
|
| "YOU'RE STILL GONNA BE MOSSAD'ED UPON"
|
| is quite comforting at times.
|
| When I'm doing security related thinking at work (or at
| home), understanding that if a powerful nation state's
| security forces become "interested" in what you're doing
| means you've already lost, takes the pressure off
| striving for perfection and trying to design systems that
| are secure against "the global passive observer" who's
| already NSL-ed your TLS cert provider and your cloud
| host. I admire what Signal/WhisperSystems build, but the
| project we're building at work that's topologically
| equivalent to just another CRUD app can't afford and
| doesn't need to be secured against the NSA or any of
| their Fiveeyes henchmen.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| This is the first time i've seen it, so you got one! thanks!
| halifaxbeard wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This is, without doubt, the greatest sequence of words on
| programming ever committed to magnetic storage.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Mickens always cracks me up. His writing style is a little
| overdone though.
| itronitron wrote:
| Yeah, I'm surprised and relieved that they haven't set off to
| write their own OS.
| dharmab wrote:
| I think that's kind of what he did at MSFT, but now he's a
| tenured professor at Harvard.
| wffurr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Man, when I thought I couldn't like this dude any more for his
| writing... What a fabulous drongo.
| npodbielski wrote:
| Nice! This is so cool even it sounds so bad! :D Would love to
| have a beer with this guy.
| jdougan wrote:
| 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
|
| <bunch of words deleted> > only reward is a
| fleeting moment of eggy, peppery, salty bliss before the next
| inevitable thermodynamic collapse.
| kurisufag wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The obvious solution is to create a robot capable of feeling
| pain and dread.
| tsukikage wrote:
| ...give it terribly painful diodes down its left side.
| lproven wrote:
| You beat me to it!
| volkadav wrote:
| Perhaps those are an essential ingredient for a full
| consciousness or experience of what we've agreed by
| consensus to call reality, but the parental part of me
| holds on desperately to the hope that if we create anew,
| those we create might have a better experience with _vague
| gesture at everything_ than us. :)
| fergie wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| I actually laughed out loud. But my wife would not understand...
| reportgunner wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| And I was wondering about the painting[0] that inspired the
| King Crimson song...
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Watch
| mdiesel wrote:
| And I was wondering if it was in reference to the Night's
| Watch of Westeros, who fittingly take a vow of celibacy and
| dedicate their lives to dealing with problems the Southern
| quiche-eaters don't understand or even believe exist.
|
| [0]: https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Night%27s_Watch
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