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

Post-Apocalyptic Programming

zserge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 165 posts

Re: Post-Apocalyptic Programming

#41

Post by luxuryballs »

Nursie wrote: post #31
manofmanysmiles wrote: post #24

I love prepping, up to a point. If we all would like to live in a world without war, the only path I see is if people learn to be strong as individuals, able to self govern, grow emotionally and take responsibility for their own actions. As long as we use collective thinking and externalization our power in organizations, believe in superstitions like money, government, “the greater good”, rather than recognizing wha…

Let me know when libertarianism achieves any more than attracting bears - https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-... Personally I enjoy my government roads, schools, fire service and all the rest. Perhaps when you’ve grown emotionally, you’ll understand that government is people working together to achieve a common good. It’s flawed and easy to get wrong, it oversteps and overspends, but I’ll tak…

Whooosh you totally didn’t get the point, the government is also just a bunch of individuals.

Re: Post-Apocalyptic Programming

#42

Post by microtonal »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #35
AeroNotix wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's called a disk snapshot.

I don't know about you, but I don't normally have the source code lying around on disk for: the compiler and its dependencies Any dynamically linked dependencies and whatever extra compilers they might need Other potentially necessary things like build tools and source control systems

I am not sure if this is still the case, but the FreeBSD (and OpenBSD) CD sets and DVD used to contain the full source code of the base system and it’s easy to rebuild the system from source. BSD also works on relatively modest hardware.

Re: Post-Apocalyptic Programming

#43

Post by Springtime »

codebolt wrote: post #15
teddyh wrote: post #2

Note: This is fun and all, but beware of taking the “Post-apocalyptic” premise too seriously. Down that road lies only hard drive hoarding and becoming a prepper.

The threat most developers should be concerned about is what happens once a major solar flare (like the Carrington event in 1859) shows up. That is destined to happen at some point, and not unlikely within the next few decades. Hard to predict the fallout for the internet and other technical infastructure more broadly, but I'm guessing it won't be pretty.

Interestingly after reading a bit of the Wikipedia article on that event the Earth apparently missed experiencing another solar storm of equivalent strength in 2012[1] by just a number of days.

Estimates in the linked article expect had it been facing Earth at the time the recovery would have taken 4-10 years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2012_solar_storm

Re: Post-Apocalyptic Programming

#44

Post by jayhoon »

vharuck wrote: post #29
jayhoon wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would a technical description in plain English (specification) and C code be sufficient to preserve a piece of software? The understanding of the specification may be different years later, but this applies even to the paintings and the works of fiction. So, the question is not only about the preservation the actual software, but also about its correct interpretation.

Sort of like how the valuable parts of math textbooks are the theorems and proofs, with the problem sets (i.e. implementations) being nice but arbitrary extras?

This is an interesting angle on essentially the same problem. Can a set of theorems about the prime numbers lead another group of people to the RSA encryption, for example?

Considering that Clifford Cocks invented a similar system 4 years before Rivest, Shamir and Adleman (and even before Diffie and Hellman published their cryptosystem), the answer seems to be "yes". On the other hand, that 4 year difference means that people have to be ready for the idea, i.e., work on their "problem sets".

Re: Post-Apocalyptic Programming

#45

Post by Nursie »

luxuryballs wrote: post #41
Nursie wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me know when libertarianism achieves any more than attracting bears - https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-... Personally I enjoy my government roads, schools, fire service and all the rest. Perhaps when you’ve grown emotionally, you’ll understand that government is people working together to achieve a common good. It’s flawed and easy to get wrong, it oversteps and overspends, but I’ll tak…

Whooosh you totally didn’t get the point, the government is also just a bunch of individuals.

The point that governments and money are superstitions and that people need to "grow emotionally and take responsibility" rather than believing in such things?

No, I'm pretty sure I got the point there.

I agree, government is just a bunch of individuals, and collectively we empower them to take action on our behalf, and they achieve things that without such cooperation would be hard to impossible. I don't believe the poster I replied to would concur, in fact a brief glance down their posting history shows this person believes governments should not exist.

Re: Post-Apocalyptic Programming

#46

Post by GrinningFool »

jayhoon wrote: post #26
kibwen wrote: post #23

Even aside from the apocalypse, I was wondering recently how someone might "pass down" some piece of software, like say a video game, to their descendants. If you want to leave a written record for future generations then it's easy enough to print out a book on some acid-free paper and reasonably expect that it will last for up to a millennium. But for robustly archiving a piece of software it's not enough to print o…

Would a technical description in plain English (specification) and C code be sufficient to preserve a piece of software? The understanding of the specification may be different years later, but this applies even to the paintings and the works of fiction. So, the question is not only about the preservation the actual software, but also about its correct interpretation.

> The understanding of the specification may be different years later, but this applies even to the paintings and the works of fiction.

That's an interesting parallel. But for it to be equivalent, I think it would have to be to the method of creating those paintings/works of fiction. Instead of passing down the Mona Lisa, you're passing painstakingly detailed instructions detailing how to make the Mona Lisa.

Re: Post-Apocalyptic Programming

#47

Post by cheschire »

codebolt wrote: post #27
cheschire wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested in where you feel the numerical value of "not unlikely" falls on a scale such as the one from Lesson 1 of this article. https://hbr.org/2018/07/if-you-say-something-is-likely-how-l...

https://earth-planets-space.springeropen.com/articles/10.118... This recent paper from Japan estimates the following likelihood for what it calls "extremely large solar flares": > for 30-, 50-, and 100-year periods to be 0.70−0.76, 0.87−0.91, and 0.98−0.99, respectively

Perfect, thank you!

I find much more value in numerical expression when it comes to topics about future events than the fuzzy and loaded English terms we tend to use in casual conversation. I had the wrong impression about your previous message based on my own preconceived notions, and numbers reduce all that.

Re: Post-Apocalyptic Programming

#48

Post by mynameishere »

Nursie wrote: post #31
manofmanysmiles wrote: post #24

I love prepping, up to a point. If we all would like to live in a world without war, the only path I see is if people learn to be strong as individuals, able to self govern, grow emotionally and take responsibility for their own actions. As long as we use collective thinking and externalization our power in organizations, believe in superstitions like money, government, “the greater good”, rather than recognizing wha…

Let me know when libertarianism achieves any more than attracting bears - https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-... Personally I enjoy my government roads, schools, fire service and all the rest. Perhaps when you’ve grown emotionally, you’ll understand that government is people working together to achieve a common good. It’s flawed and easy to get wrong, it oversteps and overspends, but I’ll tak…

all the rest

You might want to make at least a few exceptions.

Re: Post-Apocalyptic Programming

#49

Post by ljw1001 »

manofmanysmiles wrote: post #24

I love prepping, up to a point. If we all would like to live in a world without war, the only path I see is if people learn to be strong as individuals, able to self govern, grow emotionally and take responsibility for their own actions. As long as we use collective thinking and externalization our power in organizations, believe in superstitions like money, government, “the greater good”, rather than recognizing wha…

There is nothing superstitious about government, money, organizations, etc. This is a fantasy.

If you really want to exist as a society of strong individuals (assuming that’s not already a contradiction in terms) in the absence of these constructs, you have to accept the very real likelihood that stronger individuals will be trying to rob and murder you. And organizing themselves into groups to do that more successfully

Re: Post-Apocalyptic Programming

#50

Post by sempron64 »

The most important book in my opinion for post-apocalyptic programming is Charles Petzold’s Code https://www.charlespetzold.com/code/

It details how to build a working computer starting from relays. The greatest moment for me as a teenager reading this book was figuring out how a flip flop worked. Having information stored in a dynamic system’s state seemed like the most magical thing I had ever seen.

Post reply on HN