Hi everyone, I was bored during Christmas and I decided to implement plan9 semantics inside the browser. I have 9p2000 working, file servers and I've imported namespace logic from linux. My objective is to be able to mount one browser into another, and eventually implement a network stack similar to GNS. My objective has been more academic, learn more about operative systems, but this might lead to some interesting places. I would like to get into a point where we can have a browser to browser web, with its own Name System, and applications.
Hey dude, I've been screwing around implementing plan9 semantics in a OS like system for the browser (https://github.com/intigos/possimpible). I'm interested in using a x86 emulator inside a webwoker that I'm using for processes so I can run x86 code. How hard is something like this? Can you give me some pointers on how to start working on this? Thanks!
I was stuck at parents for xmas and I picked Tannenbaum “distributed systems” and “Modern operating systems”, which gave me an idea of running a "kernel" on a browser. It was more of an academic exercise than anything else, but my intention was to have a the following:
Being able to unload and reload javascript. The initial idea was to write the website inside the website, but at the core level it requires having something akin to process isolation for javascript. It also requires the dom to be isolated.
Implementing 9p2000, and share resources across browsers. I’ve been reading about the ideas of plan 9 and i would like to implement something that allows me to connect point to point to other browsers and mount their FS into mine so we can share resources.
One of the cool results that I got was that since the dom is not directly changed (each process/worker has its own partial dom and every time that it changes it a delta is sent back to the main thread for sync) it allows javascript to be running somewhere else (another browser, back end server) and sync’ed back (much like vadaain, but more agnostic).
Most of the code was inspired by the linux kernel (which gave me a reason to go learn its internals) and is kinda nasty at some points but is written in typescript as some of you have already mentioned. Someone might find it interesting even if just for the educational purpose of
I was stuck at parents for xmas and I picked Tannenbaum “distributed systems” and “Modern operating systems”, which gave me an idea of running a "kernel" on a browser. It was more of an academic exercise than anything else, but my intention was to have a the following:
Being able to unload and reload javascript. The initial idea was to write the website inside the website, but at the core level it requires having something akin to process isolation for javascript. It also requires the dom to be isolated.
Implementing 9p2000, and share resources across browsers. I’ve been reading about the ideas of plan 9 and i would like to implement something that allows me to connect point to point to other browsers and mount their FS into mine so we can share resources.
One of the cool results that I got was that since the dom is not directly changed (each process/worker has its own partial dom and every time that it changes it a delta is sent back to the main thread for sync) it allows javascript to be running somewhere else (another browser, back end server) and sync’ed back (much like vadaain, but more agnostic).
Most of the code was inspired by the linux kernel (which gave me a reason to go learn its internals) and is kinda nasty at some points but is written in typescript as some of you have already mentioned. Someone might find it interesting even if just for the educational purpose of it
I will take a look for sure. I didn't knew they actually got inferno running on a browser. Probably some of you can help me understand better on how to implement certain parts of the OS.
##9fans on discord, matrix and irc on oftc is a great start. Though due to a recent set of trolls the discord is invite only. I think there's a link on postnix.pw
I'm a software engineer with 12 years of experience academic background in AI, in particular NLP. Deep understanding of JVM (built the first JavaScript JVM), been working more recently with Python for the past few years, particularly applied to production environment deployment of AI. Looking for interesting projects to work on.
Allow me to go to your page just by entering a different domain, meaning having a URL schema similar to that of youtube, that would make things much simpler.
I'm from the EU and opened an LLC in the US. I think this list just applies. Except for the visa, that is actually the biggest hurdle. Unless you invest > $500k.
I'm not trying to be a troll, I'm just trying to find a justification. Having something that says you can only can come in if you are "Black, Hispanic, Women, Veterans, and International founders" kinda racist as fuck? It sounds exactly like segregation to me.
Again, not trying to be a troll. Not American, just trying to understand.
Good question! My best answer is that many members of these groups have an even harder time starting a startup. In addition to all the normal outreach we do to all startup founders (6500+ applied for the last batch) we also want to do targeted outreach to underrepresented groups in order to close the gap.
and you certain its all due to their skin color etc?
Sorry, I'm having a hard time to believe it.
> we also want to do targeted outreach to underrepresented
Having that much resources to invest (limited, are they?), you likely will end up funding a business based on founder's skin color. Sorry, but that how it looks like from outside.
"It's basically designed to the ycombinator staff can not be subconsciously racist towards founders."
Which brings up another interesting point. Are all the ycombinator staff comfortable with being accused of being racists? What would happen to any ycombinator staff who publicly objected to this accusation?
Everyone is racist on some level, including those who would prefer not to be. It is deeply ingrained through constant cultural conditioning and has been shown to be true in many many studies.
It's much more worse to claim that you are in no way racist, since this just suppresses the problem. All you can do is accept that you have deep sub/unconscious biases and try to correct them in your conscious mind, though no one ever fully succeeds.
Eventually, hopefully, we'll all evolve in a better direction. In the meantime, this office hours is a good idea.
It's ridiculous to start going back to this sort of racism. This is the "affirmative action or positive discrimination" that is tearing apart Africa right now.
The only sort of racism that should even be considered these days would be genetic research of ethnic groups. That's not something evil BTW. Researching those prone to heart disease, cancer or have positive/useful genes that could be used to protect all of us in the future. Alas, we aren't living the movie Gattaca yet.
> All you can do is accept that you have deep sub/unconscious biases and try to correct them in your conscious mind, though no one ever fully succeeds.
The difference between this and "We are all sinners; all you can do is accept Jesus into your heart" seems to be merely a manner of terminology.
I cannot imagine that YCombinator did not offer equal opportunity's for all applicants. But they have been slammed with some negative press over the past 2 years (and PG specifically), regarding diversity and women founders.
It is not all that surprising. They explicitly said last year they were going to do something to improve diversity.
Because, at least in America, all of the time is 'white male time', and people of color and women often feel intimidated in spaces that are dominated in this way, so efforts are made to encourage a focus on marginalized people.
I see. It just that the concept just feels weird to me, targeting specifically a few types of people. I suspect having that here where I'm from (Portugal), would have been construed as being racist.
Again, not being a troll, just trying to understand.
Notice that it's Black and Hispanic, and not Asian? At least Asian women might have dedicated office hours ("We will start with Black and Hispanic founders and if successful we hope to launch future Open Office Hours for Women, Veterans, and International founders.")
Always seems like Asian men in the U.S. get the 'worst' of being a minority. Neither the societal advantages of white majority, nor the ability to access services available to Hispanics/Blacks or women.
Agreed. I was focused on the parent commenters point that Asian Men have been successful, despite being the time of "White Privilege."
We (asian men) are well represented in tech--even when I was a kid, MIT specifically said they did not consider Asian as a underrepresented ethnic group.
Neither is black or hispanic. The entire debate around 'race' in the US I find is riddled with outdated concepts and semantics. In many developed countries's dialogue on these issues the semantics rarely touch on race anymore as it's quite meaningless and scientifically untenable. Instead when we talk about different peoples in socioeconomic debates by referring to various ethnicities (which are quite flexible, you can group people on ethnic bases by culture, religion, language and indeed nationalities or continental heritage like Asian although it's not recommended as there are obviously gigantic differences between say China, Japan and Indonesia that too broad terms become meaningless, too). The US is one of the few developed countries that really uses the word 'race' a lot and still defines people by race. Here in the Netherlands the only time we refer to the word race is when we use the word 'racism', the only word that really stuck and encompasses discrimination on ethnic basis, not race. The notion of typifying people as 'black' or 'white' in the Netherlands is not-done.
It's not an accident that America has particular problems with Black/White and Hispanic/White race relations. Comparisons of race relations in America to race relations anywhere else need to be quite careful to identify the correspondences.
The claim that race is too murky a concept to pin down is generally invoked in cases like this; observed preferential treatment for historically disadvantaged races. If race can't exist, the argument implies, neither can racism. Always ask who wins if we allow ourselves to believe this.
The truth is that racism does exist, and we can test for it using methods that are repeatable in experiment. Race is not "meaningless" in this country, and anyone claiming so is selling you something.
Bullshit. Black people aren't discriminated because they're from a 'black race', there is no black race. They're discriminated against because their skin color is black. Discrimination on the basis of skin color can (and obviously does) exist without the existence of an concept of race.
As for hispanic, that's an ethnonym, i.e. an ethnic group, that's exactly my point. This is how we talk in say the Netherlands about what you call the 'racial debate', on the basis of ethnicities like hispanic. And these ethnicities can indeed comprise of black peoples, and within that context we can and do, all the time, talk about racism and discrimination, but that's wholly different from the notion that the human race has different subraces, a black, white, yellow whatever, that's a ridiculously silly and outdated sociological model and anyone claiming otherwise is terribly ignorant.
As for 'who wins if we allow ourselves to believe', really? Do you really base your beliefs on who wins, rather than on what is true?
Just think about how silly that sounds. Imagine I said black is a lighter shade of color than white, it'd be ridiculous. Somehow such an outdated idea that human beings come from or can be separated into entirely different races, biologically different subsets of species, and that one is black and the other is white, remains in the American everyday semantics even though American academia has long moved past such a model.
Anyway, maybe this wasn't clear, when I say race isn't a thing I'm saying it's not a tenable scientific theory of human or biological taxonomy.
That doesn't mean that race as an erroneous social construct doesn't exist in the minds of people. In that way, race as a concept is still very much alive. But when someone says 'Asian is not a race', I think it's important to also note that black or hispanic or white, isn't, either, it's a social construct that is outdated, silly and that we should move past. Just like when people say 'homosexuality is a choice', when scientifically this is wrong, doesn't mean that this idea is not very much alive in the minds of some people. But when someone makes mention of it, it's important to note that it's a wrongful belief that homosexuality is a choice.
Some quick references for those who're unfamiliar with race as a social construct:
> As anthropologists and other evolutionary scientists have shifted away from the language of race to the term population to talk about genetic differences, historians, cultural anthropologists and other social scientists re-conceptualized the term "race" as a cultural category or social construct—a particular way that some people talk about themselves and others.
> Many social scientists have replaced the word race with the word "ethnicity" to refer to self-identifying groups based on beliefs concerning shared culture, ancestry and history. Alongside empirical and conceptual problems with "race", following the Second World War, evolutionary and social scientists were acutely aware of how beliefs about race had been used to justify discrimination, apartheid, slavery, and genocide. This questioning gained momentum in the 1960s during the U.S. civil rights movement and the emergence of numerous anti-colonial movements worldwide. They thus came to believe that race itself is a social construct, a concept that was believed to correspond to an objective reality but which was believed in because of its social functions.
> Craig Venter and Francis Collins of the National Institute of Health jointly made the announcement of the mapping of the human genome in 2000. Upon examining the data from the genome mapping, Venter realized that although the genetic variation within the human species is on the order of 1–3% (instead of the previously assumed 1%), the types of variations do not support notion of genetically defined races. Venter said, "Race is a social concept. It's not a scientific one. There are no bright lines (that would stand out), if we could compare all the sequenced genomes of everyone on the planet." "When we try to apply science to try to sort out these social differences, it all falls apart."
> Stephan Palmié asserted that race "is not a thing but a social relation"; or, in the words of Katya Gibel Mevorach, "a metonym", "a human invention whose criteria for differentiation are neither universal nor fixed but have always been used to manage difference." As such, the use of the term "race" itself must be analyzed. Moreover, they argue that biology will not explain why or how people use the idea of race: History and social relationships will.
Some of the confusion comes from African-American essentially being an ethnicity. There is a shared culture and heritage, but in addition to the normal aspects of an ethnicity there is the element that people from the dominant American ethnicity (white people) can put people in the African-American ethnicity based on how they are perceived.
Like a black person from Nigeria has very different experiences than a black Amercian, but black people from LA and NYC probably have a lot to relate about.
Besides which, the US as a country has put 100's of years of effort into making black a race through the force of law and through societal pressure.
I wasn't going to make that last point today but yes, black race was for centuries a legal construct in addition to an ethnic one. The American concept of race doesn't travel well.
Asian is as much a race as White or Black is. (All races are social constructed with culturally-ascribed boundaries, so really, anything that is generally perceived and treated as a race is a race; even if you restrict it to three "classical" races, White, Black, and Asian are pretty much the modern names for Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid.)
My point is, what about all the other people? The world is not divided into White, Black, Asian and Spanish-speaking. There are Indians, Central Asians, Arabs, Persians...
Even 19th century racialists in their ignorant understanding of the world didn't lump 2/3 of the world's population into a miscellaneous category.
The common racial categories today (of which others are subcategories) are (though different names are sometimes used) Black, White, Asian/Pacific Islander, and Native American. Sometimes Pacific Islanders are considered a separate high-level group, rather than part of a top-level group with Asian. [0]
(Hispanic is an ethnic group that is usually treated as cutting across racial groups.)
> There are Indians, Central Asians, Arabs, Persians...
In terms of the usual racial categories, that's Asian, Asian, White, and White.
> Even 19th century racialists in their ignorant understanding of the world didn't lump 2/3 of the world's population into a miscellaneous category.
Actually, I'm pretty sure the old Mongoloid from the long-dominant threefold racial category -- which is the closest parallel in the old scheme to the modern Asian category but is even broader -- certainly did so even more than one could argue that "Asian" does in the dominant modern scheme.
You say that like making an event 'inclusive' is some kind of chore. In fact, what we're talking about is stopping people at the door because they have the wrong skin color.
And extending an invitation for a 20 minute phone call is worse than traveling across the country to do a recruiting event at an elite college with minuscule Latino and African American enrollment how?
Like black churches and communities, professional women's societies, women's shelters, scholarships for women, women's clubs at schools, and so on? In elementary schools, where >90% of teachers are female? Among psychology majors, with 60-70% women? Do you really suggest that it is always "white male time" everywhere?
Go ask a white kid growing up in a mostly black, poor neighborhood whether he feels like it's "his time."
Initiatives like this should be based on socioeconomics, not race.
You're putting words in my mouth. But if you want to talk about that, then yes, there is more support for homeless women than there is for men.
But that is beside the point here. My point was to list a handful of the many counterexamples to "it is white male time all the time", which is a silly claim, at least as stated.
Strike that example off the list, then. It doesn't change the original comment's point.
I'm not sure how I can simultaneously be "putting words in your mouth" and pointing out things that you actually do believe.
Your examples were bad. I'm going to go ahead and assert that the "black church" example shoots past "bad" and reaches "offensive"; predominantly black churches do not exclude people of other ethnicities.
Where was the implication that they aren't welcoming? The point was that a black church is not "all white male all the time". It feels like you're looking for something to be offended about.
> My point was to list a handful of the many counterexamples to "it is white male time all the time", which is a silly claim, at least as stated.
I like to think we're all adults here. As a nerdy straight white male even I understand that it's shorthand.
Imagine we both have a bucket. Every time life gives you a "freebie", you drop a stone in the bucket. Every time you get passed over or catch crap just for being yourself you take a stone out.
I have had plenty of experiences in my life where I was targeted for being nerdy; bullied, harassed, etc. My parents were not rich and earlier in my life actually quite poor. The difference is my bucket is still mostly full. The average black man can't say that. The average white woman's bucket is fuller than the average black man's, but not as full as mine.
And yes you are pedantically technically correct: there do exist some white people who's buckets are relatively empty by this analogy. They are proportionally a much smaller percentage of all white people than the corresponding cohort of black people in the US.
That is what gripes me a bit about the responses my own tech/nerd community tends to vomit out whenever issues like this come up. Congrats, you pulled a few counter-examples out of your ass. Who cares? We're talking the overall big picture here.
But if you want to talk about that, then yes, there is more support for homeless women than there is for men.
I had a college class on Homelessness and Public Policy years ago and I am a woman on the street with my two adult sons. There is absolutely more support and better programs for homeless women than for homeless men. However, that is partly because there are a lot fewer women on the street than men, by a very wide margin. Which means that programs for homeless women serve a substantially smaller population, thus it is easier to provide something higher quality.
Part of why so few women are on the street: Family often makes sure a woman with small kids is not literally out on the street. She may not be welcome, but her kids are, and this gives her a place to stay, even if she is treated like crap -- for the sake of the kids. Furthermore, women on the street are at fairly high risk of being raped, something men on the street are not at risk of. So a lot of women will do whatever they have to do to avoid being on the street -- even if that means shacking up with some guy as a polite form of prostitution (an offer I turned down but have seen at least one other homeless woman accept).
My opinion as someone who has both studied it formally and lived it firsthand, and thus interacted with plenty of actual homeless people and observed them, is that men on the street tend to be in less desperate straits than women on the street. Fewer women end up on the street, for complex reasons which do not really translate to privilege per se. There are ways in which me being on the street is an exercise of agency that many women are denied.
Your complaint is kind of like saying "Cancer patients get the best surgeries!" It isn't exactly something to be envious of.
I do wish homeless services generally were better, mostly from a perspective of treating homeless individuals with actual respect, regardless of their gender. But complaining that homeless women have some kind of privilege is basically an ignorant statement.
As for your actual original comment about women's shelters: They exist as sanctuary for women who have been abused. A common way women end up on the street is they flee an abusive relationship where they are financially dependent upon the man. Thus, they flee for their lives with little more than the clothes on their backs. Although there are men who are victims of domestic violence, this is a much more common problem for women, both from the perspective of being assaulted and from the perspective of being financially dependent and, thus, finding it logistically difficult to leave. We don't have "men's shelters" in part because there is relatively little demand for sanctuary for abused and penniless men compared to the demand you see in the female population.
I made no mention of social disadvantages. I merely pointed out that Eminem fits the description of hypothetical "white kid" the parent commenter referenced.
when certain groups are underrepresented, then doing something proactive to improve that is not racism, it's fighting against it.
IMO social context is key. it's asymmetric, and to fix it, you need asymmetric action. if the scale is tipped to one side, then to balance it out, you add some weight to the other.
What is "under-representation"? How do you measure it, and how do you determine when all "certain groups" (which are what, exactly?) are "represented" proportionately?
These are serious questions. How do we decide: what groups should be represented (what about ugly individuals? people with specific disabilities?), and when everything is all "fair"?
It is not racism. Racism is the attitude/belief that one race is superior to another race. Also military veteran is not a race.
It is discrimination. Discrimination is having applicants use 23andMe to prove that they are more black than white, so you can give them a different preferential treatment.
Next to making the world a better place through more black startup founders, this is a PR move. Paul Graham stopped posting on YC around the time of those terrible threads on females in tech. Hackernews became renowned for their toxic response to these issues. You can still see some of that in the rest of this thread and in my comment.
What followed was Female Founders and this initiative. This discriminatory trend will only continue. YC thinks it can make their startup portfolio more diverse, by adding more black startup founders. In this lies the hidden assumption that black founders act or think differently than white founders. The terrible alternative being that YC judges the diversity of their portfolio on the skin color of their founders.
This was incredibly hard to read, but you are correct in one thing, it is not racism. It's Institutional racism, which is any system of inequality based on race.
Just apply anyway if you're European American, Asian-American, or have familial originals in the Balkans / Middle East / SEA. Playing the race card is a political move various corporations' head-honchos in the spotlight of society must submit to doing in America, but it doesn't mean they aren't willing to help someone who is a "gem in the rough" and earnestly needs their help just because that person isn't black / hispanic / woman.
But say you submit two applications of virtually same quality except one is stereotypical black/hispanic/woman, and the other stereotypical white, and the latter gets rejected, then you have a case regarding true racism, as oppose to just political correctness.
Recently in my workplace (I'm white/male, 11 person team is lead by 2 white males) we've been working on refocusing our branding on "Tech Entrepreneurs". Quick. Name the first person you think of when you here that? What do they look like? Probably white, twenty something, male. This was a problem for our team because we are trying to target more than that. We know we are, but communicating that and reaching more people is hard. It's cemented in our bias, but yeah, still, we realize that "tech" is a lot of "younger white dudes". This effort by YC is just trying to change that by making a safe place for people outside of "the norm" to be acknowledged and encouraged.
It is kind of a brute force methodology, but it is kind of all we have. We would need a more elegant understanding of the problem space in order to address such things effectively without relying on some kind of racism/classism/OtherIsm to select for who needs some help getting a leg up when they are routinely left out by our current processes. Perhaps we can gain that understanding, but if it already existed, we wouldn't have the problems we currently have. So perhaps not a good time to hold out for some perfect solution.
There's probably a less confrontational way to phrase the question if you're looking to have a meaningful discussion.
Are you confused by the concept of affirmative action? It's not a new idea and there's a considerable body of academic research and opinions for and against it online.
Racism is a pretty heavily charged accusation to make, and you made it very casually. I believe you weren't trying to troll, but rather than repeatedly saying "I don't mean to be a troll", you might have better luck by being more careful about how you phrase your concerns. That's all.
Whenever you are confused about our culture, just try following the money... problem + buzz + market = opportunity. These are good capitalist VC's acting normally, nothing unusual about it. And if I didn't miss it already, I wouldn't be surprised at a diversity-focused startup fund announcement some time very soon. In this light, this announcement is probably a test/market research for that fund.
I'm not defensive about criticisms of this YC program, although I find all of them preposterous.
My hackles are, however, raised by the virulent strain of HN comments written by anonymous users confidently asserting that they understand the motives of people they've never met.
The word "probably" in the comment upthread is where the switch flipped in my brain that made me respond. Oh really? Probably, you say? Please tell us more. You've made an assertion; it's right there in the thread. Now stand by it and back it up with evidence.
And if I didn't miss it already, I wouldn't be surprised at a diversity-focused startup fund announcement some time very soon. In this light, this announcement is probably a test/market research for that fund.
Well, at face value this could be construed as an act of "Affirmative Action". Some people in non white groups could view it as patronizing or condemn as an act of "white saviorship" or an extension of the "white man's burden" philosophy. Other critics on the other end of the spectrum would view it as counter-productive and enforcing of racial division lines or taken to an extreme as "reverse racism".
I on the other tend to give people the benefit of doubt before rushing to judgements. The fact that they excluded Asians whether for the East or the South from the preferential treatment makes me think that they're acting in good faith and with the best intentions till further notice.
BTW: I am not Caucasian. Since we brought up race in this discussion.
"It provides a cleaner, more standards-compliant, faster API than you are likely to write from scratch."
If you are using this as a web server persistence backend, I would agree with the first, more or less accept the second and reject the third. HTTP + JSON serialisation are way slower for that kind of job.
If you are just exposing the database using only the Postgres, in that case is interesting, however, I have concerns about how more complex business logics would work with such a CRUD view.
https://github.com/intigos/possimpible