Aller Artix-7 FPGA Board with M.2 Interface - <AUTHOR> https://numato.com/product/aller-artix-7-m-2-fpga-module <comment><USER2> Shameless Plug, check out the Arduino Vidor 4000 , similar form factor and interfacing [https://store.arduino.cc/arduino- vidor-4000](https://store.arduino.cc/arduino-vidor-4000)

<comment><USER3> Is it actually capable of talking PCIe over that edge connector?

<comment><USER4> The things I've read say it's not PCIe it just repurposes the connector. So far, I don't think it's even possible to use the FPGA properly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> PCI-E is a good form factor for embedding an FPGA in a laptop, (especially as the spare but is still very difficult to debug issues with if you need high performance, you would not expect to actually get the full 2.5GT/S without some very hard work in the rest of your design.

See the fun issues the XTRX project had getting good IO performance with an FPGA based SDR in the same form factor (PDF): [https://xtrxsdr.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/xtrx-chasing- pci...](https://xtrxsdr.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/xtrx-chasing-pcie- performance.pdf)

A larger problem with this board, it doesn't have any onboard JTAG programmer, so if you put it into your laptop you will have to take it out every time to reprogram it! This is a shame, as Mini PCI-E mandates a USB 2.0 interface as well which would be useful for a programmer, while M.2 apparently only has USB optionally, see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.2#Form_factors_and_keying](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.2#Form_factors_and_keying)

</comment><comment><USER6> Without expensive Xilinx IP to drive tandem configuration over PCIe, how is this useful for development when installed in a laptop (or any enclosed device without direct access to JTAG TAP)? LitePCIe[1] was briefly mentioned, but I don't see how this addresses the issue.

Also, the mandatory heatsink for "heavy designs" (without any notion of what that means) is a bit...limiting.

[1] [https://github.com/enjoy-digital/litepcie](https://github.com/enjoy- digital/litepcie)

<comment><USER7> Vivado and Artix-7 include a hard IP block [1] for PCIe Gen2, with Linux and Windows drivers.

A similar device, [https://picoevb.com](https://picoevb.com), has a virtual JTAG cable.

[1] [http://xilinx.eetrend.com/files-eetrend- xilinx/download/2013...](http://xilinx.eetrend.com/files-eetrend- xilinx/download/201303/3844-7699-yongsailingsi7xiliefpgashejiqianrushipciemokuai.pdf)

<comment><USER8> That IP block is only used to talk to the PHY, in this case the high-speed transceiver hardware built into the 7-series FPGAs. You still have to license some (very) non-free IP from a vendor like Northwest Logic or Xillybus if you don't want to take on a major R&D project to get PCIe up and running.

Then there's the question of driver licensing on the OS side, if you want Windows support. Not sure if there are any prepackaged free-as-in-beer solutions for that. There were none when I looked into it a few years ago.

<comment><USER7> UCSD's RIFFA [1][2] open-source PCIe framework includes Windows 7 & Linux drivers and their 2015 paper [3] claims support for Xilinx 7-series FPGAs.

[1] [https://forums.xilinx.com/t5/Xcell-Daily-Blog- Archived/Need-...](https://forums.xilinx.com/t5/Xcell-Daily-Blog- Archived/Need-fast-efficient-open-source-PCIe-DMA-for-your-FPGA- RIFFA-2-2/ba-p/642947)

[2] [https://github.com/KastnerRG/riffa](https://github.com/KastnerRG/riffa)

 _> RIFFA (Reusable Integration Framework for FPGA Accelerators) is a simple framework for communicating data from a host CPU to a FPGA via a PCI Express bus. The framework requires a PCIe enabled workstation and a FPGA on a board with a PCIe connector. RIFFA supports Windows and Linux, Altera and Xilinx, with bindings for C/C++, Python, MATLAB and Java .. Users can communicate with FPGA IP cores by writing only a few lines of code ... No knowledge of bus addresses, buffer sizes, or PCIe packet formats is required. Simply send data on a FIFO interface and receive data on a FIFO interface. RIFFA does not rely on a PCIe Bridge and therefore is not subject to the limitations of a bridge implementation. Instead, RIFFA works directly with the PCIe Endpoint and can run fast enough to saturate the PCIe link._

[3] [https://87c7e184-a-d06fb7e1-s-sites.googlegroups.com/a/eng.u...](https://87c7e184-a-d06fb7e1-s-sites.googlegroups.com/a/eng.ucsd.edu/matt- jacobsen/06645504.pdf)

<comment><USER8> Hmm, that looks really cool, thanks. It definitely wasn't around when I needed it, and I'm surprised not to have heard of it in the meantime. Seems like a legitimate end-to-end solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> yjftsjthsd-h Something I've been wondering lately, watching FPGAs become more accessible: How hard would it be to implement new codecs (ex. AV1) on a FPGA, and thereby get support for new codecs in "hardware" by buying such a card once, plugging it in, and then reflashing it when new (FOSS) codecs come out? Especially since some of these cards at least claim to support being left inside a laptop. I assume there's some work to implement the codec in verilog (or whatever they use these days), and some effort to pass the audio/video streams to the card and then back to the system for output, but I have no idea how terrible that is; somewhere between "it would take a team of engineers years" and "download these 2 existing FOSS components and run `make install`" I assume:)

</comment><comment><USER9> This is awesome! Mobile FPGA development with a PCIe interface is a big deal. Now if only the vendors would give us access to usable tools...

<comment><USER10> Is the Vivado software any good? I assume a license comes with the board.

<comment><USER9> Sorry, didn't see this until today. For low end devices they vendors usually have a free version, in this case Vivado Webpack so you probably don't need to worry about licences. It's better than it's predecessor but the tooling as a whole is way worse than even the most frustrating IDEs for CPU languages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Open source (PCB design) alternatives:

1\. PicoEVB (M.2 2230 with XC7A50T): [https://picoevb.com](https://picoevb.com)

2\. NiteFury (M.2 2280 with XC7A200T and 8Gb DDR3): [https://www.crowdsupply.com/rhs- research/nitefury](https://www.crowdsupply.com/rhs-research/nitefury)

</comment><comment><USER12> If my memory serves me this also uses an Artix-7 100T and is half the price: [http://squirrelsresearch.com/acorn- cle-101/](http://squirrelsresearch.com/acorn-cle-101/)

You can thank miners for the cheap FPGAs.

<comment><USER7> Delivery has been rocky, [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4391318.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4391318.0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Do you plan to update this device with TPM 2.0?

</comment><comment><USER13> I had never heard of this M.2 form factor: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.2)

How many computers (desktops or laptops) support this? I think it's safe to assume my MacBook pro doesn't have space for one of these inside.

<comment><USER14> It's the replacement for mini-PCI-express and it's used in almost every laptop these days.

<comment><USER13> Good to know. What I meant to say is that it doesn't appear that there is any space for users to add boards like this. in a MacBook pro (which is what I have). I was just confused since this talked about being something that would fit in a laptop, but I can't imagine a laptop shipping with an FPGA board inside it, unless it was a really specialized laptop meant for hardware development.</comment></comment></comment>


Foxmarks (Mitch Kapor's startup) adds suggested tags to Firefox bookmark sync - <AUTHOR> http://blog.foxmarks.com/?p=528

<comment><AUTHOR> This brings Foxmarks closer to delicious, which is a direct competitor. Mitch Kapor talks about Foxmarks vs. Delicious here: <http://blog.kapor.com/?p=28>

</comment><comment><USER2> Would be cool to have an API for this (just send it a URL and get back a list of tags)

<comment><USER3> I've made this for my startup. We look at a _ton_ of sources. Delicious, Magnolia (RIP), Technorati + about 5 more. It gives you a very good list of tags.

Would people be interested in me turning this into an API?

<comment><USER2> I would...</comment></comment></comment>


The Big Cycles over the Last 500 Years - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/big-cycles-over-last-500-years-ray-dalio <comment><USER2> This stuff is very interesting and informative, but I had several reactions:

1\. What happens if you extend the dates back further?

2\. It's interesting to see China's dominance decrease and rise again over a long time period. I knew this but it's interesting to see quantitatively. It leads me to wonder if a simple rise-fall pattern is necessarily "natural" or if more variation exists.

3\. It seems like in certain cases, the fall of prominence isn't the same. I don't think of the Netherlands as ever falling into irrelevance or destitution, just maybe declining in power as the major economic and military power. This seems different from more dramatic boom-bust cycles. Maybe I'm wrong about this, as I know relatively little about Dutch history.

4\. It's tempting to predict major from transitions but they don't seem to correlate as well with the rise and fall curves, possibly because in actuality there's so many and lots of the major conflicts involve coordinated interests of smaller powers, rather than single interests of single powers.

5\. I wonder if some of this is oversimplified because of changes in what constitutes a nation-state. That is, what we recognize as "China" wasn't always as such, and many European states may become better understood as part of the EU in the future.

<comment><USER3> I'm neither a historian nor an economist, but as far as I know, there's been quite a few ups and downs like that throughout history, with Florence and Spain being the most prominent examples that comes to my mind. I'd guess that the major issue with going even further back is that there simply isn't enough detailed data.</comment></comment>


Australian miners out-earning bankers - <AUTHOR> http://www.chinapost.com.tw/business/asia/australia/2010/05/05/255248/Australian-miners.htm

<comment><USER2> I think the headline writer did not understand the article. The high pay is going to "professions, such as electricians, engineers and scientists" working for mining companies. Not miners.</comment>


Linksys Worm "TheMoon" Summary: What we know so far - <AUTHOR> https://isc.sans.edu/diary/Linksys+Worm+%22TheMoon%22+Summary%3A+What+we+know+so+far/17633 <comment><USER2> Just another reason that I'm glad that I bought a buffalo router that came with dd-wrt preinstalled.</comment>


Manhattan Project: Australian physicist alerted Britain to US secrecy plan - <AUTHOR> https://cosmosmagazine.com/physics/manhattan-project-australian-physicist-alerted-britain-to-us-secrecy-plan <comment><USER2> It's worth realizing that this was at a time that the United States was working on a plan to place all nuclear research (weapons and otherwise) under the UN, and subject to UN agreements. The UK and the Russians opposed this, and the idea basically died. At the same time, the US shut down (for a year) both the lend-lease and the atomic research programs, feeling that they were no longer needed after the war. After the cold war got going, they restarted both. It was too late for the British. Atlee started work on a "independent nuclear policy" in 1947.

Lookup the Acheson-Lilienthal Report in 1946. It's a fascinating "road not taken".

<comment><USER3> Richard Rhodes writes about these subject in 'The Making of Hydrogen Bomb' and 'Arsenals of Folly', but I wouldn't summarize it the way you did...

<comment><USER2> Richard Rhodes had a particular axe to grind. I would suggest looking at Atcheson and primary sources before Rhodes. You are also mixing titles - Making of the Atomic Bomb, Dark Sun and Arsenals of Folly.

Making of the Atomic Bomb is amazing... but also bone chilling when you realize that scientists were basically advocating a dictatorship of technocrats.

<comment><USER4> Given post war history, can you say it would have been much worse than what we've had?

The last 60 years have been a study in how to keep the forms of democracy while making a dictatorship of the billionaires.

<comment><USER5> > The last 60 years have been a study in how to keep the forms of democracy > while making a dictatorship of the billionaires.

The political system was even more run by the elites 60 years ago. For one example, we raise issues now that party insiders or elite-written election rules may somewhat distort the results of the primaries (and caucuses that are open to most party-registered voters, though they are more time consuming and for that reason exclusionary than primaries), 60 years ago we had the same partisan duopoly, without even a fig-leaf of meaningful primary elections, where caucused were much more limited in participation.

<comment><USER4> Yet today we have a system that benefits the rich far more than the one in 1958. This is what I mean by the forms of democracy. We have even quantified it [0].

That we got the vote for blacks in the south isn't much of a win, from then on the poor blacks along with the poor whites have been disenfranchised through other means.

That we don't elect representative in smoke filled rooms doesn't mean much when the control has moved to selecting who gets to vote in the primaries [1].

[0] www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materials/Gilens%20and%20Page/Gilens%20and%20Page%202014-Testing%20Theories%203-7-14.pdf

[1] [https://edition.cnn.com/2016/04/19/politics/new-york- primary...](https://edition.cnn.com/2016/04/19/politics/new-york-primary- voter-problem-polls-sanders-de-blasio/index.html)

<comment><USER6> This is an incinderary comment: "benefits the rich far more than the one in 1958."

First, that would require a tremendous amount of data and an inherently biased framework of benefits valuation to support.

Second, you can't demonstrate the opposite, namely, that without the first happening, all others would have been better off. Sometimes wealth and structural freedoms benefit all participants, not to the detriment of the lower end, even when opportunity costs are included.

Not saying you are wrong, but your argument is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's worth remembering the other people involved in this. Peierls and Frisch worked under Oliphant at the University of Birmingham, and they wrote the memorandum which formed a major part of the Tizard Mission to the US. This also included the much better design for the Cavity Magnetron, also developed in Birmingham by Randall and Boot, who also worked for Oliphant.

In 1943 a British delegation led by James Chadwick (who discovered the neutron and won the 1935 Nobel Prize) went to work on the Manhattan Project, and included Oliphant, Peierls and Frisch, as well as Klaus Fuchs (who it turned out was a Soviet spy) and Tony Skyrme (more famous for his work on what later became known as 'skyrmions'), all from Birmingham, the Danish Physicist Neils Bohr (Nobel Prize winner in 1922) and Lord Cherwell who had invited Bohr to England and who was an advisor to Churchill and who advocated area bombings of Germany. The British techological 'Tube Alloys' programme was absorbed into the Manhattan project.

Bohr advocated sharing the technological developments with the Russians, and met both Churchill and Roosevelt in attempts to try and convince them of this. The British mission basically left with the passing of the Atomic Energy Act 1946 which prohibited the sharing of nuclear secrets with allies by the US government. It wasn't until a few years after the British developed their own nuclear warheads (the first being the Blue Danube) that cooperation on nuclear warhead technology began again in 1958.

</comment><comment><USER8> The heart of TFA:

 _Holden, however, reveals documents that indicate on one occasion he risked leaking information of such potential magnitude that the FBI might well have taken drastic action against him had he been discovered. Certainly, it imperilled the cooperative relationship between the two nations regarding weapons research – by revealing that the cooperation was, in fact, only going one way._

 _The researcher details a 1944 meeting at Berkeley, California, between Oliphant, Nobel laureate Ernest Lawrence and the military man in charge of the Manhattan Project, General Leslie Groves. At the fiery meeting, Groves – usually a very discreet operator – let it slip that there were some parts of the research that were not being shared with the British._

 _An imminent visit to Washington DC by one of Winston Churchill's closest advisors, Lord Cherwell, was to be an exercise in misdirection. Further, Groves revealed, after the end of World War II the US intended to ensure that nuclear weapons manufacture and the storage of nuclear material would happen only in the central portions of North America._

 _Secretly appalled by this, Oliphant – Holden plausibly suggests – stopped work almost immediately and then travelled, perhaps for three days on a train, to the British embassy in Washington DC, and there sent a confidential memo to the British authorities, blowing the whistle on the US intentions._

Was putting nuclear weapons manufacture and storage in the central parts of the US part of keeping the technology secret?

<comment><USER9> Also further away from long range bombers, though I don't know if that was an immediate concern prior to the cold war, but surely anticipated. Fissile materials are made further towards the coasts, but production and assembly is in Kansas City and Amarillo. Not to mention missile fields and bombers also in the central states.

<comment><USER10> There is an interesting documentary about how Britain dealt with nuclear materials despite not having remote locations like the US. It may be "Windscale: Britain's Biggest Nuclear Disaster", but I'm sorry if that's the wrong title.

<comment><USER9> Saw that recently on YouTube. A plutonium fire in an air cooled reactor; what a mess.

<comment><USER11> Luckily the chimney had a filter - known as a cockcrofts folly when it was constructed.

[http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england- cumbria-29803990](http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cumbria-29803990)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Link to abstract: [http://www.publish.csiro.au/HR/HR17023](http://www.publish.csiro.au/HR/HR17023)

</comment><comment><USER13> The title suggest he was doing something secretive between three countries but it should be noted that Australia didn't have non-British passports until 1949 and at that stage Australia was still very much part of Britain.

<comment><USER14> We might have had British passports, but we were certainly not part of Britain.

<comment><USER13> We had British passports and British currency. There was a lot of nationalistic work put in after World War 2 so that Australia and NZ would see themselves as completely separate countries.

<comment><USER14> No we had Australia currency. There certainly was a breakaway from Britain during WWII after Churchill abandoned us and the USA came to our rescue. Curtin pulling the Australian troops out of North Africa was probably the point of no return.

It was a slow divorce from the empire, but it was well advance pre WWII.

In some ways the relationship of Australia (and NZ) was similar to that of the countries of the EU. There was free movement of people (provided you were white) and free trade around the empire, but most people thought of themselves as citizens of their own countries.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The last third-party Javascript snippet you'll ever need - <AUTHOR> http://uberjs.com/

<comment><USER2> I would probably explain what on Earth my product is before I go about asking developers for $10 to get early access to it...

</comment><comment><USER3> If you have so many Javascript snippets that you need another javascript snippet to organize them you may want to think about how your developing your application and what your application means to the user.

Heavy Javascript on the client side either means your writing a full featured web app or the entire website is clientside in javascript. The former probably has performance penalties that make this a bad idea. The later, IMHO, is just bad.

The only useful thing I can think of with this is the fact that it can serve up a custom load of libraries all bundled and gziped in one file. But to that extent I can run a small script on my computer that will do that and then upload it to my server rather than having to cross domain half of my Javascript.

</comment><comment><USER4> I had the same idea a while back but never executed.

Pricing is going to be tricky. You have to convince your users that your service is really worth it. Copying and pasting code into their site costs nothing and takes very little time. Once it's there it rarely changes. Most users don't understand the performance impact of 3rd party scripts.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've recently started using an asset manager for my latest app, and I believe they are becoming more common (rails 3.1.3 includes asset management).

Why would I use a package manager as a service when I can essentially do it for nothing?

Maybe I'm just not understanding your service. A few years ago, this might have been something I might be interested in (though I doubt I'd pay for it), I think you may have missed the market opportunity.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't know about rails asset management (I'm more of a django guy), thanks I'll look into it.

I really like your description of it as a package manager. In those terms I'm starting to think more like an app store for your web site.

My thinking was more around a company setting where you've got change control processes in place and deployments perhaps aren't as easy to orchestrate/are too much effort.

Then there's my personal itch which is that for every product I build I seem to be doing the same things over and over again with Olark, Woopra, Google Analytics etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How reliable will uberjs.com be as a CDN? Also it seems to be jumping the gun a bit in regards to asking people to pay for it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting - very curious as to how it works though, maybe something you could add on the page. Since your audience is developers I'm sure others would appreciate that info also.

<comment><USER8> yup, some sort of example how it would work for me as a developer would be awesome!

E.g. I have uservoice, optimizely, ganalytics, kissinsights and totango snippets in my app right now - what UberJS would do for me? Would my biz. partner be able to add new snippets/delete old ones on his own (without interrupting my flow ;)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I've updated some of the copy on the site. Hopefully it's clearer now.

Love the idea of getting your biz guy to update things for you. Yes, it would definitely work for that scenario.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback everyone-much appreciated. Working on the wording; seems like I did a poor job of explaining what it does and how it works.

</comment><comment><USER9> A web2.0 web based GUI for uglify-js and closure compiler. Just what I've always wanted.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just a little something I've been working on over the holidays.

<comment><USER10> Any other info? I'm interested, but the "Why We Think Uber JS Rocks" section isn't quite enough to convince me to pay $10 to peek behind the curtain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Uh.... All I see is some web 2.0 layout, some cryptic mumbo jumbo about something called uberjs, and a plea for $10 or I can sit in line and wait for something I'm not even fully sure what it is.

Perhaps you should make me love your product, before trying to get me to give you my hard earned money.</comment>


Coherent: Unix variant for DOS compatible PCs (1994) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/coherent/ftp/manuals/COHERENT-4.2.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> From the Mastodon comment[0] where I found this:

 _" COHERENT was a UNIX variant for DOS compatible PCs and this is the 1409 page document that will teach you everything._

 _" This document assumes you've never used a computer much less UNIX and walks you through installation, configuration, how logging in works, basic usage, using text editors, basic and advanced administration, network administrator and eventually topics including programming!_

 _" You walk in a baby and walk out a C programming UNIX wizard, all on your 286 with 2MB of ram."_

\-- penny, @email@example.com

[0] [https://mathstodon.xyz/web/statuses/104720370803968311](https://mathstodon.xyz/web/statuses/104720370803968311)

<comment><USER2> Manuals:

[https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/coherent/ftp/manuals/](https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/coherent/ftp/manuals/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I can't overstate how great Coherent and this pale green book were. It was a complete UNIX experience and taught me valuable skills that I use to this day. The manual is probably the best organized and most comprehensive one that I've seen for ANY software to this day. I still don't know how Mark Williams Company pulled off this amazing feat with such limited resources. To anyone who was involved with its production - thank you and much respect.

<comment><USER4> Similar with me. I was loving using UNIX at work on Suns ~1991/2, but it wasn't until I borrowed a PC with Coherent for a few weeks that I really was able to explore it properly, both in the sense of being to work as root, and having this excellent book. I was sad when I had to give the PC back, until Linux hit the scene a little while later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I had never heard about this, but from the nicely written manual it looks like a neat OS.

Since the source code is available I could not resist porting "lc" (List files in categories and columns): [https://github.com/gdm85/lc](https://github.com/gdm85/lc)

If you have nostalgia of that command you can now enjoy it on your modern Linux!

<comment><USER6> It's a command with my initials too, so how could I _not_ compile and install this :) Thanks for doing this!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Coherent made a fatal choice at the wrong time. Mark Williams Company started to ramp up their marketing right before Linux really started to his. When they had to make a choice to add either XWindows or a TCP/IP stack to Coherent, they chose XWindows. Coherent could have been a great Internet OS at the dawn of the commercialization of the Internet but they blew it.

<comment><USER8> If they'd chosen to skip X and create a TCP/IP stack, in the early-to-mid nineties Unix battles they would have had to compete with Xenix, BSDI and the other BSDs, and Solaris on x86. Not to mention Linux, the non-x86 options, and whatever else I forgot.

In hindsight, it's not like there was some kind of very powerful move they could have made.

<comment><USER9> Per memory, Coherent 4.0 showed up around 1992-3, with TCP/IP and pseudoTTYs. X11 came along a little later. But by then it was too little too late: the Linux distros were already eating their lunch.

Same with SCO. When I worked there circa 1991-95, the company lost $250 in license fee payments to assorted other companies for every complete copy of Open Desktop that they sold -- fees for the TCP/IP stack, the compiler, the AT&T license, the Motif skin, CDE, the IXI desktop ... even purchasing IXI didn't reduce it by much. They tried to go head-to-head with Windows NT as a workstation OS on the desktop and nearly broke the company, then backed off to focus on enterprise sales and support contracts. There was no way they could compete with a solid Linux as a desktop option after the late 1990s. And SCO was a _much_ larger and more powerful company than Mark Williams (by 1991 they had about 1200 employees worldwide and $200M/year revenue -- going by memory).

<comment><USER8> That is wild. I didn't know SCO was ever losing money in quite that way.

I worked tech support for an early PC point of sale credit card payment processing company and Linux was actually one of the last *nixes we supported. I don't believe they had even rolled it out in 1998 when I quit. We supported DOS, Windows, SCO, and maybe one other commercial Unix with just a few users. It was excruciatingly obvious to the more knowledgeable rank and file where things were going, and I even wrote an internal document once explaining how to run the SCO version of our software on Linux using its iBCS support.

The internal discussion I remember about which operating system we would support next as online payment processing took off was mostly about BSDI vs Linux (but with our upper management focused very strongly on NT). Perhaps oddly, both options were treated seriously.

<comment><USER9> SCO wasn't losing money on sales -- IIRC their cheapest product at the time (bare-bones SysV 3.2 SCO UNIX) sold for upwards of $600 without the dev tools or extras: Open Desktop retailed for a minimum of $1200 in its most pared-back form -- but the $250 licensing fees put a floor under SCO that made it impossible for them to compete as a desktop OS for the general public, as opposed to enterprises that expected to spend $3000-4000 per seat on tech support and licensing for every employee, every year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21200902](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21200902)

now open sourced at [http://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/source.php](http://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/source.php)

<comment><AUTHOR> Fabulous ... thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> An old magazine ad for Coherent. [https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/wp- content/uploads/2017/1...](https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/wp- content/uploads/2017/12/Coherent-v3.0-ad.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER12> Coherent was produced by the Mark Williams company, founded by Robert Swartz, Aaron Swartz' father.

If you ever want to see what good documentation looks like go read the manuals (linked elsewhere in this thread).

</comment><comment><USER13> Thank you Coherent. And thank you to all the guys/girls that used to work at the Mark Williams Company.

Coherent opened my eyes to the world of UNIX. 30 years later, and I have never yet used Windows as my every-day desktop.

</comment><comment><USER14> Advent of Computing did a great podcast about Coherent recently. For anybody who's interested, I'd recommend checking it out:

[https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/coherent-is-not- unix/i...](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/coherent-is-not- unix/id1459202600?i=1000474914279)

</comment><comment> Max-q Coherent was the operating system running on the Commodore 900, that was cancelled when Commodore bought Amiga Inc.

</comment><comment><USER15> We used Coherent- I remember it was much cheaper than SCO UNIX / Xenix (back in the days when you had to pay $500 for the C compiler). Here's an ad showing this:

[https://virtuallyfun.com/category/coherent/](https://virtuallyfun.com/category/coherent/)

The install time claim is interesting- I'm sure this comes down whether it optimizes floppy drive reads (for example, read a track at a time).

</comment><comment><USER16> It is such a marvel of cosmic luck that Linus Torvalds could not afford to buy this for his computer.

<comment><USER17> Even more luck that BSD was being sued, while Linus decided to use GPL.

<comment><USER18> I was flirting with setting up my own server with bsd386 in the 90s. The main thing stopping me was money: I had the offer of free rack space at my old college's network but my income was low enough relative to the cost of building a server (and a rackmount case) that I never pulled the trigger. My 20-something self would be envious of the amount of computing power I have within arm's reach right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I remember one of the reviews, where the reviewer complained he couldn't get uucp working between Coherent and a Unix box and he suggested it be called "cccp" (Coherent to Coherent Copy Program) instead.

edit: s/could/couldn't/

<comment><AUTHOR> Typo ...

 _Edit: Sorted._

<comment><USER19> Fixed that

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I used to run Coherent back when I was in high school. I ran it on a 386SX with 3 megs of RAM (yes, odd number.) I later installed SLS Linux on that same machine.

The Coherent documentation was amazing. I still remember that huge book...

</comment><comment><USER21> Instantly reminded me of Desqview, one of many systems murdered by Bill Gates' dirty tricks while the government was asleep at the switch of an IBM 360.

</comment><comment><USER22> The page design of the book reminds me of the old WROX Press books</comment>


5 Early-Stage Alternatives to the Traditional Investment Model of Startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/readwritestart/2009/07/five-alternatives-to-traditional-investment.php <comment><USER2> A bit of a misleading headline here. It's just a listing of five different YC- type programs. That counts as one alternative in my book.

This is like titling an article _5 Alternatives to the Traditional Mortgage_ and then listing five different but nearly identical ARMs from five different banks.</comment>


Ask HN: What books/tutorials/articles to read to get into reverse engineering? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I've been picking up the basics in the past few months - I started out with playing around with some open source tools (radare2/Cutter), and then watching Josh Stroschein's introductory course on PluralSight [1]. The course is more Windows oriented but that's alright for the basics.

Then, I asked my friend to make me a really basic CrackMe challenge [2]. Solving this was where most of the real learning took place.

The tool I have been learning is Cutter [3], which is the official GUI for radare2. It's a feature-rich and open-source tool that allows you to reverse engineer without the licensing/price restrictions of the more well-known paid/closed-source tools.

To help concrete this new knowledge, I'm currently working on a 3-part introduction to reverse engineering with Cutter series, part 1 of which is out so far [4].

Something that I've found very useful for learning is to analyse your own binary rather than someone else's. Just write basic C++ programs ("What's your name?", calculator, etc - almost as if you're learning programming from scratch again), compile and then reverse engineer them.

Having full knowledge of what the binary does and how it works allows you to focus on understanding the technical details (registers, stack, etc) rather than jumping straight in at the deep end with a mystery binary. Once you've got your head around how a basic binary works, the knowledge is very transferable to binaries where you _don 't_ have the source code.

[1] [https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/reverse-engineering- gett...](https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/reverse-engineering-getting- started)

[2] [https://github.com/jamieweb/crackme- challenge](https://github.com/jamieweb/crackme-challenge) __Looking at source.cpp may reveal the solution, so be careful! Get a trusted friend to audit the code first if you are concerned about its legitimacy. __

[3][https://github.com/radareorg/cutter](https://github.com/radareorg/cutter)

[4] [https://www.jamieweb.net/blog/radare2-cutter-part-1-key- term...](https://www.jamieweb.net/blog/radare2-cutter-part-1-key-terminology- and-overview/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Lately I read this interesting article on STM flash protection, incredibly clear, but also rich of low level details: [https://www.usenix.org/conference/woot17/workshop- program/pr...](https://www.usenix.org/conference/woot17/workshop- program/presentation/obermaier)</comment>


Why Did a Billionaire Give $75M to a Philosophy Department? - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/why-did-a-billionaire-give-75-million-to-a-philosophy-department <comment><USER2> This is why philosophy is important:

Education has two related yet distinct purposes. The first is to endow us with specific domain knowledge and reasoning. The second is to endow us with general reasoning and critical thinking skills.

The value of natural language philosophy - not formal logic and other mathematically adjacent subfields - is that it teaches us to be as rigorous as possible when reasoning in natural language.

Given that so much of our lives and the events of history and society unfold in natural language and that it is in natural language that we do much of our critical thinking and reasoning, it's important that we hold ourselves to as high a standard as is reasonably possible when talking (either to ourselves or others) as when performing mathematical calculations.

It's often said that one of the benefits of studying math is that it improves critical thinking skills. I believe this to be true, but I also believe that if our primary concern is improving our day to day critical thinking skills, then we would be better served studying natural language philosphy than mathematics, because on a day to day basis we tend to think and reason and debate and engage with one another in natural language.

<comment><USER3> The irony is that when philosophers make statements like these, they never provide any empirical evidence to back it up. Does philosophy really improve critical thinking and reasoning skills? We're told it does, based on nothing more than "that's what it feels like to me". Rigorous reasoning is worthless without facts to reason on.

<comment><USER4> There's some evidence that philosophy majors score pretty high on the GMAT (for graduate admissions to business school) and on the LSAT (for law school), as well as pretty good on the GRE Verbal and GRE Analytical Writing tests.

Less good at the GRE Quantitative Reasoning than all the science disciplines (and economics) but better than the rest of the arts and humanities subjects (and better than accounting, which is slightly worrying).

See [http://dailynous.com/value-of-philosophy/charts-and- graphs/](http://dailynous.com/value-of-philosophy/charts-and-graphs/)

Also: [https://www.salon.com/2013/07/01/be_employable_study_philoso...](https://www.salon.com/2013/07/01/be_employable_study_philosophy_partner/)

[http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/why-philosophy- majors-...](http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/why-philosophy-majors- rule_n_4891404)

(I may be biased on this though: I have a BA and MA in Philosophy.)

<comment><USER5> > There's some evidence that philosophy majors score pretty high on the GMAT > (for graduate admissions to business school) and on the LSAT (for law > school), as well as pretty good on the GRE Verbal and GRE Analytical Writing > test

As a philosophy major you should be the first to point out this doesn't imply causation.

<comment><USER4> > you should be the first to point out this doesn't imply causation

Nah, I'd rather just go nuclear on causation, with the assistance of Hume...

"...experience only teaches us, how one event constantly follows another; without instructing us in the secret connexion, which binds them together, and renders them inseparable... It is allowed on all hands that there is no known connexion between the sensible qualities and the secret powers; and consequently, that the mind is not led to form such a conclusion concerning their constant and regular conjunction, by anything which it knows of their nature."

<comment><USER6> Why doesn't Hume believe in human mind grasping causal reasoning? Even in non- scientific settings, causal reasoning is fundamental for humans.

<comment><USER7> Humes point is that we can't perceive causal relationships, even if we think we do. We can only perceive events, and then our mind constructs causal relationships on top of them. But these relationships are not inherent to the world, they are only in our minds.

<comment><USER8> Judea Pearl wrote a whole book about proving causality (and when it can't be proven).

A rough summary is available as a YouTube video:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HUti6vGctQM](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HUti6vGctQM)

<comment><USER9> They are very very closely related, and philosophers and Pearl cite each other on the topic of causation, but Hume and philosophers are usually concerned with a slightly different problem. Hume is concerned about the nature of the necessity between any cause and effect which seemed to be implied by our experience of events. Whereas Pearl (much less knowledgeable about Pearl) is interested in how we can model events to give us high confidence in the relation applying in a particular case while leaving the topic of necessity and the fundamental nature of causation to the side and assuming a much more vague /ad hoc notion of what causation is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Philosophy today is one of the most undervalued discipline. It doesn't yield any return on investment immediately and is mostly confusing at the beginning, so people don't tend to have interest in it.

I think we have some sort global identity crisis because of that. Religions are not sufficient enough and science doesn't even try to answer the question of "why?" but rather "how?". In result of that, we ended up with no ideology and no tools to build one for ourselves.

This is laughably ironic, because we really want some change in the way we live and think and yet, we don't turn back and evaluate what people came out with in the history.

edit: if you want to start with it: [http://philosophizethis.org/category/episode/](http://philosophizethis.org/category/episode/)

<comment><USER11> Philosophy gets a bad rep for the same reason psychology and sociology and applied macroeconomics do: because there is no way to clearly distinguish right ideas from wrong ones, so the field is flooded with junk.

<comment><USER12> Not sure I would lump economics and psychology in there. Economics tries to explain some observable phenomenon which arises from human behavior which we don't fully understand. Psychology again, tries to understand human behavior. In theory, if we measured the correct things and the measurements were accurate, we'd be able to make accurate predictions based on those measurements in both fields. The problem is that we aren't able to do that currently.

Philosophy is asking way more subjective questions, like "what should we do, and why?". The answer will always vary by context and individual and there will never be a "right" answer.

<comment><USER13> Ok, I will say something. Economics had a problem in that it is partially descriptive, as you say, but it is also partially normative: it wants to say how things should be. Then it gets the two parts confused a lot, leading to _homo economicus_ stuff.

Behavioral economics is more relevant to both the fields you describe.

<comment><USER12> Do you mind giving an example?

<comment><USER13> In _Misbehaving_ , Richard Thaler describes a meeting of psychologists where he describes the best current thinking of economists as to what a "rational" person would do if the government were to give a payment to all citizens as an economic stimulus. I don't remember the details, but it involves the recognition that a citizen would have to pay the money back (as taxes) at some point, and that the citizen would have descendants in perpetuity---as a result, the economic stimulus would fail because the citizen would lock the payment into a 0-risk savings account. He had to have another economist at the meeting reassure everyone that that was indeed the current best economic thinking in order to stop them from laughing at him.

He recalls telling the story to Some Fameous Economist and being told that (a) yes, that was the most rational thing to do in that situation, and (b) that it was indeed what everyone would do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> To answer the baity headline:

>William H. "Bill" Miller III ... attributes "much" of his success ... to the "analytical training and habits of mind" his philosophical study at Johns Hopkins inculcated. The way he sees it, more students should have the chance for that intellectual stimulation.

<comment><USER15> As SMBC put it - is philosophy valuable? Yes, every day, a thousand times. Is a philosophy credential valuable? No.

<comment><USER16> FWIW I would consider philosophy degree a plus when reviewing job applications.

<comment><USER17> In what context, and a plus over what other degrees? I don't agree that it's a plus unless the candidate has double majored in a relevant degree, or did a philosophy BSc. and a relevant MSc afterwards.

If I were reviewing applications for a software engineering role, I would primarily prioritize computer science and electrical engineering degrees, then secondarily mathematics and physics degrees. Of the subset without a degree in STEM, I'd probably weight philosophy higher than some alternatives, but they still wouldn't have priority unless their professional experience was more impressive than other candidates.

I was initially a philosophy major during my undergrad (up to and including 300 and 400 level courses in Kant). I don't think philosophy degrees are a useful signal to compare against more targeted degrees. They can certainly teach logical and abstract thinking; however, at at the default level of effort I've observed, most students do not graduate a philosophy degree with significant enough critical thinking skills to overcome the sheer amount of domain knowledge they're missing by not having studied computer science. And it gets difficult to specify exactly what it would look like for a philosophy major to make up for the lack of computer science education by having superlative reasoning ability, if that's the case.

Ideally you want a student who demonstrated that they put significant effort into their academic work, enough to intellectually grasp it, apply it and reason about it. If you have two students who appear to have put equal effort into their studies, I can't see why philosophy would be a plus. A philosophy degree will be a net negative for the professional functions of a software engineering role unless the applicant has spent significant time overcoming the lag in programming experience and computer science understanding.

In other words, I think people use philosophy degrees as a proxy for overall intelligence and reasoning ability, or maybe even academic effort. But I consider that to be a red herring - philosophy studies are useful, but they don't intrinsically encourage more effort and engagement than more relevant degrees do, and the skills they offer are far less relevant for the professional work of engineers (not _irrelevant_ , just missing quite a lot). If a candidate demonstrates strong suitability for a software engineering role with a philosophy degree, they probably would have excelled with or without it because they had to be motivated enough to self-study computer science anyway. The philosophy major in particular doesn't encapsulate or confer that kind of motivation and engagement, so it's better to just look for a targeted degree.

Again, this isn't to say philosophy isn't useful - much of my dialectic style comes from Wittgenstein. It's just that on its own philosophy is like arithmetic: fundamentally useful and broadly applicable in everyday life, but not nearly enough to prepare one for a _software engineering_ job.

<comment><USER11> Only the first 1 out of 4 years of a CS/EE degree is relevant to most professional software "engineer" degrees. That's why Mathematicians and Physicists have O problem joining the field. You can learn programming as a hobby as well as you can learn philosophy as a hobby, as long as you have foundational critical thinking skills

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why on earth is the entire last paragraph devoted to Lawrence Krauss's musings on philosophy? It may represent a widespread attitude found among physicists, but not one many people with a background in both disciplines shares. In physics forums, the same dismissive attitude can also be found about pure math for which a use in physics has not yet been found.

A fourth paragraph might talk about how any curriculum in financial engineering begins with an even bigger assumption than in physics that the big problems are already mostly understood, and that the rest is computation to fill in a few gaps. And yet this donor thinks the formal study of philosophy is important.

My understanding of what he is saying about philosophy and discipline has to do with developing the capability to handle a _large_ problem analytically. This is different than the type of discipline where you break things down into small problems then work through them individually.

When Lawrence Krauss talks about philosophy, you get the impression that he thinks it is all people in coffee shops in black turtlenecks being awed by random thoughts rather than people doing anything formal or logically rigorous.

</comment><comment><USER19> I believe that at least an introductory philosophy course should be required for all college students. (maybe high school, I don't know). Philosophy has a bad reputation because 1) it's seen as the most pretentious of fields and 2) getting a degree in it is not a quick path to making any money. But in my experience, most people who haven't taken a course don't _really_ know what philosophy is about.

I took a few courses and I consider them among the most valuable parts of my college experience. You look at some of the oldest questions(and various answers) around, and use those to learn how to really form and analyze arguments objectively. I may be preaching to the choir here, but if you haven't studied any philosophy, try it out!

<comment><USER20> Back in the seventies, physics was called natural philosophy. In college, it amazed me how many people study sciences without even asking or caring why. They don't know the limits of the knowledge they seek or of the tools (repeatable observations) in their belt because they never learned how to ask uncomfortable questions or learn formal logic. Most certainly some of this is by design as colleges evolved into little businesses obsessed with crafting financially successful students before well rounded ones. On the other hand, some is probably just a reflection of the rationalist zeitgeist—philosophy became supernatural. To me, it's sadly dogmatic. You stop asking existential questions when your peers stop challenging your belief system.

<comment><USER21> If by seventies you mean 1870s

<comment><USER20> At my liberal arts college, that "tradition" stuck around longer than other places in what I imagine is at some level a statement of reverence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Only a truly great scientist gets mentioned as contributing to the philosophy of science, or is characterized also as a logician on wikipedia.

That's often because they were pursuing some philosophical riddle which they were more concerned about than the theories that would later become their legacy.

Cantor and Godel wanted to find God, and in their search, provided much of the early work for Turing and computer science to develop.

Einstein similarly wanted to know the mind of God, and in doing so contributed to quantum mechanics and invented relativity.

Bell's explanation of his theorem in a 1985 BBC Radio interview includes an appeal to the debate between free-will and determinism when interpreting his results.

TL;DR — Important scientific and mathematical breakthroughs often come from a deep exploration of metaphysics, epistemology, free-will, and ontological truth.

<comment><USER23> > Bell's explanation of his theorem in a 1985 BBC Radio interview includes an > appeal to the debate between free-will and determinism when interpreting his > results.

That sounds very interesting. Is the radio interview (or a transcript) still available? I tried searching for it and found a possible match for a show on BBC Radio 3 in 1983 [1].

[1] [http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/7c8c2aba48024a5e925d0aca69c57b21](http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/7c8c2aba48024a5e925d0aca69c57b21)

<comment><USER22> [https://books.google.com/books?id=KHezRs7nsAgC&pg=PA45&sourc...](https://books.google.com/books?id=KHezRs7nsAgC&pg=PA45&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting to read all the responses in this thread observing incidental correlations between intellectual or practical accomplishments and philosophy. Famous scientists are sometimes interested in philosophy, philosophy majors score high on the GRE, etc.

It does not follow at all that studying philosophy helped cause those accomplishments.

The situation is similar to brain training games like Lumosity. They do not make you smarter in general, just better at that particular game. People who are already smart will do better.

Personally, my argument for philosophy is that I enjoy it.

<comment><USER22> Many famous scientists were interested in philosophical questions like the nature of reality or "is God real?" and are only known as scientists because they had these ultimately philosophical concerns.

<comment><USER5> This is such a lame argument. Nobody is going to cure cancer or build a better tokamak because they attended a fancy wood-paneled lecture on God at Johns Hopkins.

<comment><USER22> Well ...

The Institute for Advanced Study is perhaps best known as the academic home of Albert Einstein, Hermann Weyl, John von Neumann and Kurt Gödel, after their immigration to the United States. ... founded in 1930 by American educator Abraham Flexner, together with philanthropists Louis Bamberger and Caroline Bamberger Fuld.

Why not Johns Hopkins?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why not? He can do whatever he wants with his money. He's spent $100M on a yacht already[1].

I was a little surprised that this was the largest donation to a Johns Hopkins humanities department. This may be wrong, but I think of Johns Hopkins as in the upper echelon of schools that tends to have massive endowments and wealthy alumni.

[1] [https://www.superyachtfan.com/superyacht_utopia_dv.html](https://www.superyachtfan.com/superyacht_utopia_dv.html)

<comment><USER25> True, but if your country gives you tax breaks for donations, by giving you're depriving other tax payers of your money. You're saying that what you're donating to is more worthwhile than the average government spending, which may not be true for some "charities". (By the way, this argument is not originally mine but was in an interesting comedy on BBC Radio 4 yesterday: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09ply4y](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09ply4y))

<comment><USER26> A more accurate way of looking at this is that the government is incentivizing a desirable behavior by matching a portion of any money a person contributes to the common good. You have to give up some of your own after-tax wealth to get the govt to kick in 20-30%. Since an individual is mostly putting their own money into the charity, they will want to maximize their good feelings by chosing a charity that adds a lot to the common good. And this is especially true for people who make large gifts.

...At least for the US tax system(where this gift was made)

<comment><USER11> That's the theory, ut in practice most people give not to charities for others but to schools/clubs/churches they are a member of, so it's a form of nongoverbmental State/Local taxes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Philosophy is a great example of something that's definitely helpful, just tough to lay out concrete benefits. You can give it a lot of ham-fisted examples (philosophy helps with maths), but at the end of the day philosophy is about life itself.

<comment><USER10> I'd rather say, philosophy is about thinking, it is a tool. Tool that gives you ability to reason about pretty much anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> While laudable, it has some ego trip elements - he's not only thankful for the "mind discipline" his training endowed him with, but wants the department to bear his name. Really, a philosophy department named not after a famous local philosopher or distinguished scholar, but a wealthy financier that happened to study there? It a telling sign of our times.

<comment><USER29> There are a lot of ego games. Non-anonymous philanthropy is probably the last one we should discourage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Philosopher Michael Huemer considers this one of the most wasteful charitable donations: [http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2018/01/huemer_on_ultra....](http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2018/01/huemer_on_ultra.html)

</comment><comment><USER31> Nice! My opinion is that philosophy is _the_ undervalued discipline in American life today.

To back that up: I would rather work with a philosopher than an arbitrary "other degree" holder outside of the Math/CS preference. Particularly as the person grows in seniority, the education becomes more and more useful.

</comment><comment><USER32> It's less interesting of a donation to me because the donor studied philosophy there. It makes it seem more reactive than proactive.

</comment><comment><USER33> All roads link to philosophy. At least, all Wikipedia articles do.

</comment><comment><USER34> Why do we need philosophy?</comment>


Ember.js, Another year of churn, instability and festering frustrations - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@frustrated_ember_developer/ember-js-another-year-of-churn-instability-and-festering-frustrations-4d01838361cb

<comment><USER2> Its not just emberjs. It is almost with any framework you pick. AngularJS has been doing same. Angular 2.0 even without migration plan is the worst.</comment>


Intel chips could power future iPad versions, says research analyst - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/intel-chips-could-power-future-ipad-versions-says-research-analyst-7000008169/ <comment><USER2> You can read some HN comments on CNN's report of the same analyst report here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4854377></comment>