Technically, you can say that an OS is a term for managing complexity. We're managing the complexity that comes with the modern age of the internet & the web platform. At this stage, I agree it might sound like an overstatement, but it's aligned with our vision and where we eventually want to take it.
What isn't clear is how you believe this manages complexity. What does it actually do that my browser and desktop aren't already doing for me?
As with all of these "desktop in a browser" demos, it looks and feels fun for a couple minutes, but there's no story-telling here as to why I'd actually want to commit to using it instead of the tried-and-tested tools that are native, accessible and already right there.
I understand your point. It's still early stages and I expected these kind of comments honestly, because I myself saw a lot of these "desktop in a browser" demos that ultimately had no use to me whatsoever.
I believe our approach is very different though, and as time goes by hopefully it'll become even more useful to even more people.
Technically, you can’t redefine what an OS is just because you want to call your app an OS.
Sorry but you have made a lot of bold statements about encryption etc. but this one I found extremely irksome.
There is a whole CS course called Operating Systems. I believe what you are showing HN is a software product, built with programming languages that are products of the discipline Computer Science, which defines what an OS is. Not you.
I studied Operating Systems in my CS studies for two years, so I’m quite familiar with the methodologies and the strict definitions that define a traditional OS. I’m not trying to redefine what an OS is in the academic sense. My intent is more about using the term as a metaphor to communicate what our product does—similar to how many technical terms are borrowed from the physical world.
You’re right that there’s a whole CS course on OS, and I respect that. But I believe it’s also okay to extend the concept in a practical way to help users understand what this product aims to offer, especially in today’s interconnected landscape.
It’s also good to note again that we're still at the early stages of this project. Hopefully by time the name makes more sense, or we might even change it entirely!
Bletchley Park is excellent - I went in the early 2000s when it was just some huts and a country house. I return in 2024 and they now have full exhibitions, including one that goes through the full history and workings of the Bombe. I thought I was a bit of an Enigma nerd but it turns out I hadn't heard of Lorenz/Tunny at all and so it really added another layer to my knowledge of the work at Bletchley.
Also visiting Bletchley and then watching the Imitation Game makes it seem like the rushed medical drama from Mitchell and Webb [0]
Turing's life and work was a big part of my research and I was involved with a number of academic Turing memorial events, I've had dinner with his closest living relative. I'm well aware of all the inaccuracies.
I was given 114 minutes I don't think I could have done a better job of giving a feel for the guy, his work, and the situation to an intelligent person who has a passing interest in tech (e.g. my wife) than they did in the film.
This may just say more about me as a story-teller than as a genuine appraisal of the film.
If you want detail, read Turing's biography by Andrew Wiles, such a great work and impressively comprehensive. If you just like code breaking and WWII history, read The Hut Six story by "Turing's boss" Gordon Welchman, the publication of which lost him his American and British security clearances.
>I was given 114 minutes I don't think I could have done a better job of giving a feel for the guy, his work, and the situation to an intelligent person who has a passing interest in tech (e.g. my wife) than they did in the film.
I feel like I'm fairly forgiving when it comes to glossing over some details in order to serve the greater narrative, but I feel all of the film's points of conflict were fabricated to the point of being misleading.
Turing was a genius, but he wasn't a sole genius loner - he was a much liked and integral member of the team. Much of the plot is about him supposedly single handedly and against the will of Bletchley working on the Bombe when the Polish Bombe was a tried and true solution to Enigma-sans-plugboard already. This image of him being some kind of rebel is absolutely not giving you a "feel" for his situation.
The idea that the machine wasn't working and they had no idea how it was going to work until they "suddenly had the idea of using a crib" is trying to add a peril and a Eureka moment that didn't exist. From a "let's not get waded down in the details" point of view, sure but again this really adds more of a sole genius factor on Turing specifically when he was but one genius in a factory of geniuses.
Things like having one bombe in the corner of a room quietly breaking all the Nazi's codes? Sure, why not. It's very silly and downplays the roles of hundreds of Wrens, but you can have that for the sake of storytelling.
We may have different things that we wanted from this film, but honestly rewatching it it just felt like it was muddying the waters of what I already knew rather than being a fun accessible glimpse into the life of one of History's greatest minds.
I think it might have been generated by AI. A human would have noticed huge discrepancy between simple examples with grep and ls and the magic AWK script that would basically deserve a separate article just to grasp how it works.
I think a lot of people underestimate awk or aren't aware of its capabilities - I used it quite a lot when I was new in my career before really understanding it. There's enough awk snippets floating around that you'll see it in folks' toolkits next to sed & grep even though they're just using a couple preset scripts.
I didn't really understand what it was capable of until I had a colleague use it to parse the output a CLI tool with no actual reasonable machine-readable output - something like a 100 line awk script to turn some hardware vendor's joke of a config tool into output that could be piped into another script. That's when I understood what awk was, and that my colleague might have been the devil.
For me the biggest hurdle was learning what they were 'for' and that took a long time. The real magic for me was capture groups - I could now suddenly see why you'd have a regex and not just string matching.
Then it was about knowing a situation or a problem when regexes would apply and knowing how to look up the things I needed to solve that problem. Some regex 'phrases' are good for grepping, others for find and replace. Some will help you swap names around, some to reformat phone numbers.
After a while the phrases give way to general understanding and certain things become fluent.
I still only really write short or basic regexes, but I use them all the time in editing text or doing things that are a little bit complicated but actually a short regex just turns it from a hard problem into an easy problem.
Flippant HN comment aside, the syntax for trivial manipulations in jq is pretty straightforward, very similar to defining a dictionary in python. Non-trivial transformations are going to be complex regardless and not having to learn an 'obscure syntax' isn't going to make it easier to get your head around.
It reminds me of when people release a "friendlier syntax" for regular expressions: at the end of the day you still have to learn the underlying concepts in order to complete your task.
In order to use your tool it looks like you still need to learn JSONpaths as a concept and then learn what all the operators in your drop downs mean at which point why not learn some obscure syntax?
And then I have the overhead of an electron app which I'm paying $9 a month for.
Maybe this has a future as the component of someone else's all-in-one low/no-code ETL platform, but as a standalone tool being pitched to the HN crowd it makes no sense.
Thanks for the feedback - really appreciate it :)
TBH my target audience was TBH my target audience was more non technical/ less technically proficient/ developer adjacent people who might have to interact with json data. I agree with the fact is hard (if not impossible) to completely abstract away all the complexity and you'll still need to learn the underlying concepts. However my intention was to try to find the balance where I can reduce the amount of learning and difficulty involved
I found these two videos on combinators and lambda calculus recently. They're only tangentially related to Haskell, but they are the most approachable videos on the topic I have ever seen.
You can also dual boot and/or swap out hard drives. It took me a goodly while to get immersed and comfortable with Linux, so I'd definitely plan a discovery and/or transition phase before hard switching over.
