Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

D. J. Bernstein

aaronsw.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 121 posts

Re: D. J. Bernstein

#21

Post by andreyf »

whirlycott1 wrote: post #5

I have dealt with qmail for ten years. It is a complete joy once you have it up and running. You literally can stop thinking about it because it always works. However, getting it up and running requires adding in antispam, antivirus, virtual mailboxes, some additional protective and administrative patches, some extra stuff for SMTP-AUTH, SSL/TLS, reporting, and perhaps a few more patches for fun. Patches, you say? We…

If code I write is hard to deploy to your system, I don't think my code can be to blame. Rather, it's the fault of the system/language in which we are working.

Re: D. J. Bernstein

#22

Post by aristus »

twism wrote: post #14
tzury wrote: post #9

Linus, RMS, Guido, and others. I can think of so many other names. You know what, even John Resig's jQuery software is served by millions of servers, running in billions of web pages every day. This all "THE BEST" thing, is somehow pointless IMO.

jQuery gives me goosebumps whenever I get a chance to work with it.

You can turn that off:

    $.fn.defaults({goosebumps: false});

Re: D. J. Bernstein

#23

Post by idlewords »

techiferous wrote: post #18

"One bug — one bug! — was found in qmail." While this is certainly impressive, the number of bugs is not a good metric for measuring the effectiveness of a programmer. A programmer is only as good as the business problems she solves. One bug in a life-critical application could be catastrophic. On the other hand, a programmer that makes sure their code is completely bug-free would not do well in a domain where time-t…

Also, the number is at least four bugs. http://cr.yp.to/qmail/qmailsec-20071101.pdf

Re: D. J. Bernstein

#24

Post by l0stman »

> No other programmer has this kind of track record. Donald Knuth probably comes closest, but his diary about writing TeX (printed in Literate Programming) shows how he kept finding bugs for years and never expected to be finished, only to get closer and closer (thus the odd version numbering scheme).

I don't want to be dismissive but I think TeX is more complex and uses non trivial algorithms. So it's like comparing an apple to an orange.

Re: D. J. Bernstein

#25

Post by ErrantX »

idlewords wrote: post #7
owinebarger wrote: post #3

Despite the purple prose, I generally agree with Aaron's sentiments about great programming ("the best", I can't say, but definitely "great"). He is, however, also very rude, at least in his online persona. Having "a forceful, uncompromising vision" is an orthogonal issue to how you choose to communicate.

I can't read anything Aaron writes without my mind flying back to his seminal essay on the unanticipated softness of the human breast: http://them.ws/post/1736/testing_something

Thanks for that. Not come across it before and I cant remember a blog post that actually touched me so deeply!

Re: D. J. Bernstein

#26

Post by jacquesm »

l0stman wrote: post #24

> No other programmer has this kind of track record. Donald Knuth probably comes closest, but his diary about writing TeX (printed in Literate Programming) shows how he kept finding bugs for years and never expected to be finished, only to get closer and closer (thus the odd version numbering scheme). I don't want to be dismissive but I think TeX is more complex and uses non trivial algorithms. So it's like comparing…

Anybody that says an email server is 'non trivial' hasn't looked at the guts of one yet.

Re: D. J. Bernstein

#29

Post by rit »

wallflower wrote: post #8

Bill Joy "As a UC Berkeley graduate student, Joy worked for Fabry's Computer Systems Research Group CSRG in managing the BSD support and rollout where many claim he was largely responsible for managing the authorship of BSD UNIX, from which sprang many modern forms of UNIX, including FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Apple Inc. has based much of the Mac OS X kernel and OS Services on the BSD technology. Some of his most…

Exactly my thought when I read this. IIRC he wrote one of the early TCP/IP implementations as well, which a lot of OS' still use a derivative of. And dns and mail rely upon.

The wikipedia article links specifically to a sadly abandoned project that Salon had years ago to document the free software revolution.

http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/fsp/2000/05/16/chapter_2_par...

I've always remembered it and wished they'd finished but it sadly seems to have stopped getting new entries in '01:

http://dir.salon.com/topics/free_software_project/

Re: D. J. Bernstein

#30

Post by mseebach »

whirlycott1 wrote: post #5

I have dealt with qmail for ten years. It is a complete joy once you have it up and running. You literally can stop thinking about it because it always works. However, getting it up and running requires adding in antispam, antivirus, virtual mailboxes, some additional protective and administrative patches, some extra stuff for SMTP-AUTH, SSL/TLS, reporting, and perhaps a few more patches for fun. Patches, you say? We…

> I've done it many times before manually and it takes around ten hours to do it.

This is exactly why I've been using Postfix (or, preferably, get Google or someone else to handle it for me).

Easy to install is a feature, and a pretty close cousin of the "shipping" feature.

DJBs software is interesting mostly from an academic perspective. In the real world, it's hard to justify using something else, when apt-get gets the job done in literally seconds.

Post reply on HN