U
Story
The Night Watch (2013) [pdf]
"if you find yourself drinking a martini and writing programs in garbage-collected, object-oriented Esperanto, be aware that the only reason that the Esperanto runtime works is because there are systems people who have exchanged any hope of losing their virginity for the exciting opportunity to think about hex numbers and their relationships with the operating system, the hardware, and ancient blood rituals that Bjarne Stroustrup performed at Stonehenge"

So true, so funny.

Also, this article subtly conveys the experience of being a working class immigrant at a top academic institution (something that I relate hard to)

His latest project is a heavy metal tribute album to himself by himself, made on sabbatical: https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens
I’m inspired by this on so many levels. What a renaissance man.

> I warn you! This music is not for the faint of heart. Despite my lack of sound mixing experience, vocal training, or general common sense, I have created a poignant distillation of the human condition.

Man, when I thought I couldn't like this dude any more for his writing... What a fabulous drongo.
Nice! This is so cool even it sounds so bad! :D Would love to have a beer with this guy.
At the beginning of my career, I merely found it funny.

Now I find it relatable.

(don't install a signal handler in Python for SIGSEGV, especially if it's being triggered by C you're calling)

Years go by, but I always find myself getting back to this article, it's just the true essence of systems programming.
In 2020, my pandemic hobby project was learning to write a kernel in Rust (instead of sourdough like everyone else). Around that time, I read this essay for the first time. It was one of the funniest things I had ever read, because it hit me at the right time in my life to appreciate how true it was. An absolute gem.
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This is, without doubt, the greatest sequence of words on programming ever committed to magnetic storage.
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Related. Others?

The Night Watch [pdf] (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42440496 - Dec 2024 (28 comments)

The Night Watch (2013) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41219779 - Aug 2024 (1 comment)

The Night Watch (2013) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34522845 - Jan 2023 (35 comments)

The Night Watch (2013) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19289353 - March 2019 (10 comments)

The Night Watch (2013) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16188538 - Jan 2018 (1 comment)

The Night Watch (2013) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13954077 - March 2017 (33 comments)

The Night Watch [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12490689 - Sept 2016 (2 comments)

The Night Watch (2013) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9671020 - June 2015 (21 comments)

The Night Watch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6741804 - Nov 2013 (3 comments)

The Night Watch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6735980 - Nov 2013 (3 comments)

Oh, I didn’t know it was posted as recently as December, I just stumbled upon this again and assumed maybe not a lot of people have seen this recently
He's _such_ a great writer/speaker. It's totally worth reposting him every 3 month.

I think this is my favourite piece of his, "This world of ours":

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf

I thinkbhe's a better writer than speaker, but I suspect if I'd seen him speak first I'd have it the other way around.

I love all his Usenix articles and they always cheer me up if I'm having a grumpy day at work.

For me, acknowledging that:

"YOU’RE STILL GONNA BE MOSSAD’ED UPON"

is quite comforting at times.

When I'm doing security related thinking at work (or at home), understanding that if a powerful nation state's security forces become "interested" in what you're doing means you've already lost, takes the pressure off striving for perfection and trying to design systems that are secure against "the global passive observer" who's already NSL-ed your TLS cert provider and your cloud host. I admire what Signal/WhisperSystems build, but the project we're building at work that's topologically equivalent to just another CRUD app can't afford and doesn't need to be secured against the NSA or any of their Fiveeyes henchmen.

This is the first time i've seen it, so you got one! thanks!
Mickens always cracks me up. His writing style is a little overdone though.
Yeah, I'm surprised and relieved that they haven't set off to write their own OS.
I think that's kind of what he did at MSFT, but now he's a tenured professor at Harvard.
This made me so happy. Too many good quotes.
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Honestly I hope to be able to write something like this at some point in my career. This is the kind of satire that comes from deep expertise, passion, and desire for the future generations to not repeat the mistakes you have made. This is one of the best articles of all time.
From the headline I thought this was going to be about night watch the book[0] (I have only seen the movies)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Watch_(Lukyanenko_novel)

I don't recall much about the movie, except that I enjoyed it at the time, but I was wondering if the title had a relationship to a different book[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Watch_(Discworld)

And I was wondering about the painting[0] that inspired the King Crimson song…

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Watch

And I was wondering if it was in reference to the Night's Watch of Westeros, who fittingly take a vow of celibacy and dedicate their lives to dealing with problems the Southern quiche-eaters don't understand or even believe exist.

[0]: https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Night%27s_Watch

His talk at Monitorama was great-- one of the most entertaining talks around!
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I actually laughed out loud. But my wife would not understand...
My hobby: asking LLMs to write essays "in the style of James Mickens"

example:

    > Write a paragraph on spaghetti carbonara the style of James Mickens.

    > Ah, carbonara. A dish of such deceptive simplicity, it's practically a quantum singularity of culinary hubris. You think, "Eggs, cheese, guanciale, pasta? Child's play!" But
<bunch of words deleted>

    > only reward is a fleeting moment of eggy, peppery, salty bliss before the next inevitable thermodynamic collapse.
bleh. i don't mind in principle having robots do art and writing for us, but their chronic inability to be properly cynical stains everything they produce. it's all "big bang theory" flavored, for lack of a better phrase.
The obvious solution is to create a robot capable of feeling pain and dread.
Perhaps those are an essential ingredient for a full consciousness or experience of what we've agreed by consensus to call reality, but the parental part of me holds on desperately to the hope that if we create anew, those we create might have a better experience with vague gesture at everything than us. :)
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...give it terribly painful diodes down its left side.
You beat me to it!
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajGX7odA87k

If only James Mickens had shared his thoughts on AI somewhere...