Why Skin-Deep Correctness Isn't, and Foundations Matter • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Skin-Deep Correctness Isn't, and Foundations Matter

#11

Post by MrJagil » Sun, Jul 24, 2011, 3:38 PM UTC

asciilifeform wrote: post #9

mycroftiv wrote: post #5

I've been reading this blog intermittently for quite a long time, and despite a lot of good conceptual thinking, I believe the author fails to understand a lot of principles which are equally important to the ones that he espouses. Maybe the most important is independence of layers - the author seems convinced that, as he says in this post, "it is the bedrock abstractions of a system which create its overall flavor.…

> He never seems to acknowledge that technologies like virtualization actually work to create independent environments. This is because they don't. Environments can be independent in the information-security sense (what you and others confuse with full conceptual independence) without being independent in the propagation-of-brokenness sense. Easy example: your power supply. Give me, say, a Common Lisp (rather low bar…

Stop calling people idiots.

Re: Why Skin-Deep Correctness Isn't, and Foundations Matter

#12

Post by asciilifeform » Sun, Jul 24, 2011, 4:19 PM UTC

MrJagil wrote: post #11

asciilifeform wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He never seems to acknowledge that technologies like virtualization actually work to create independent environments. This is because they don't. Environments can be independent in the information-security sense (what you and others confuse with full conceptual independence) without being independent in the propagation-of-brokenness sense. Easy example: your power supply. Give me, say, a Common Lisp (rather low bar…

Stop calling people idiots.

Stop telling people to stop calling idiots idiots.

Re: Why Skin-Deep Correctness Isn't, and Foundations Matter

#13

Post by derleth » Sun, Jul 24, 2011, 7:01 PM UTC

> “auto-save”, which claims to wipe out the abomination of volatile-by-default documents

I have to say, something like this wouldn't be very useful to me. I want more control over how my mass storage is used: I frequently run systems with mostly-full partitions, and something like that sounds like a very quick way to push my system over the edge into constant failure mode.