James Mickens

James Mickens is a national treasure. Go watch his talks on YouTube and read everything he writes. https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/ Excellence. Quality. Science. These are just a few of the words that have been applied to the illustrious research career of James Mickens. In the span of a few years, James Mickens has made deep, fundamental, and amazing contributions to various areas of computer science and life. Widely acknowledged as one of the greatest scholars of his generation, James Mickens ran out of storage space for his awards in 1992, and he subsequently purchased a large cave to act as a warehouse/fortress from which he can defend himself during the inevitable robot war that was prophesied by the documentary movie “The Matrix.” In his spare time, James Mickens enjoys life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, often (but not always) in that order, and usually (almost always) while listening to Black Sabbath. Feel free to start here https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=D5xh0ZIEUOE

If people want to read all six, here they are! https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens My favorite is The Night Watch.

The rest of his articles are also hilarious. Every time I come across them again, I make sure to re-read a few. Here's a collection of his articles: https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens Here's my favorite: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thenightwatch.pdf

Quoting James Mickens is always the winning move. I recommend the entire collection of his wisdom, https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens

Yes. Very much so. try here for a great start https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens

The Night Watch: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf > Even as we speak, systems programmers are doing pointer arithmetic so that children and artists can pretend that their x86 chips do not expose an architecture designed by Sauron. > You might ask, “Why would someone write code in a grotesque language that exposes raw memory addresses? Why not use a modern language with garbage collection and functional programming and free massages after lunch?” Here’s the answer: Pointers are real. They’re what the hardware understands. Somebody has to deal with them. You can’t just place a LISP book on top of an x86 chip and hope that the hardware learns about lambda calculus by osmosis. Really, I recommend everything by James Mickens every chance I get: https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens

Great read, thank you both. Have added this page to my reading list. https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens

I was very fortunate to be in a class taught by James Mickens in my undergrad. As he does in this article, he shared his wealth of cybersecurity experience but presented in a very entertaining way. If you like this paper, he also has many other stories from CS academia that is approachable and fun to read[1]. One of my favorite talks by Mickens is a 30-minute roast of Javascript and web security[2]. [1]: https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens [2]: https://vimeo.com/111122950

Try some of james mickens articles: https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens They are written in a similar style, I really love them.

I guess I have read this already, but did not remember it very much. Halfway through, I thought it was written by James Mickens. So, if you liked this, you might also like Mickens' essays like The Night Watch <http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thenightwatch.pdf>. All should be available at https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens And they are not only very funny, but also insightful.

Several more humorous articles on the subject: 1. https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks 2. https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens (I love The Slow Winter, but To Wash it All Away is probably more relevant here)

James Mickens is great! He's listed his own work here: https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens > James Mickens offers his timeless insights for free, because he loves you and he wants you to succeed. Please enjoy the undeniable masterpieces which are collected below.

His pieces in Login are great. There's links to the rest of them and his others works at http://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens

You should also read James Mickens' USENIX articles if you haven't: http://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens The humour and tone is similar to the "Programming Sucks" article. I recommend starting with "The Night Watch".

Nicely ranted. I'm one who feels that ranting is a kind of art (or can be profitably interpreted that way), and well-formed rant counts as art. This is a good rant, not great, but heartfelt and sincere with judicious use of curse words and rhetorical flourish. (For greatness in ranting see the work of Mickens, perhaps our finest performing ranter of the day. https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens ) - - - - On a tangent, I've been keeping an eye on the Arcan project https://arcan-fe.com/ > Arcan is a powerful development framework for creating virtually anything between user interfaces for specialised embedded applications all the way to full-blown standalone desktop environments. > At its heart lies a robust and portable multimedia engine, with a well-tested and well-documented interface, programmable using Lua. (Nothing against Wayland, I'm just mentioning it to say something potentially useful to someone.)

>"Whenever I go to a conference and I discover that there will be a presentation about Byzantine fault tolerance, I always feel an immediate, unshakable sense of sadness, kind of like when you realize that bad things can happen to good people, or that Keanu Reeves will almost certainly make more money than you over arbitrary time scales. Watching a presentation on Byzantine fault tolerance is similar to watching a foreign film from a depressing nation that used to be controlled by the Soviets — the only difference is that computers and networks are constantly failing instead of young Kapruskin being unable to reunite with the girl he fell in love with while he was working in a coal mine beneath an orphanage that was atop a prison that was inside the abstract concept of World War II." James Mickens, 'The Saddest Moment' - https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thesaddestmoment.pdf edit - further wisdom; James Mickens, Associate Professor, Authority On All Things, Harvard - https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens

> Doesn't every freaking mainstream technology suck? I regularly come across rants from significant developers regarding this issue. There probably is no way to prevent this from happening. Because worse is unfortunately better. Web technology is fundamentally different in that you have a big standards body regulating everything from layout down to color blending, then leave it up to multiple vendors to implement all that stuff at great expense and with long delay. Worse, it's all shoehorned on top of some "document model" than was never designed with applications in mind. It's a waste. To see what a better platform could look like, consider this: https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/publications/atlantis-robust-extensib… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uflg7LDmzI The key here is reducing surface area. It's entirely possible that WASM will bring us closer to that, but the web developers of today probably won't like that. > I regularly and seriously consider to leave software development because of this (as I'm really suffering) but then I remember how much power it gives me despite the horrible faults it has. I don't know what you do, but I find web development to be significantly more frustrating than other areas. That doesn't mean there isn't frustration elsewhere though and it's definitely part of the job.

Also just found this thanks to another user. https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom/

Your theories on Muppet physiology are childish and naïve, and I viciously refute them in my upcoming article “Parasitic Infections of Muppet Gastrointestinal Hand Holes.” [0] https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/tenure-announcement-april-2019/

His latest project is a heavy metal tribute album to himself by himself, made on sabbatical: https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens

Another absolute gem: https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/tenure-announcement

This writing sounds like stuff from James Mickens ( https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens )

I wasn't entirely surprised when I read your response, although I didn't know that. I sort-of suspected somebody that entertainingly frank would have to confront some PR positioning issues. Harvard has other fish to fry. They'll get to James when they're on top of the other stuff I guess. They let him publish https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens which is a good sign!

This and other articles and talks can be found on Mickens' web site: https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens

As an aside: James Mickens is a treasure. If anybody reading this hasn't read any of his articles or watched any of his talks before stop now and do it. You won't be sorry. https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens

So, just for context, he wrote a number of these: https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens. They're joke articles meant to satirize some field of computer science; cryptography isn't the only topic he discusses.

Clickable link for the paper: https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/alto.pdf

Don't miss his tenure announcement: https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/tenure-announcement

This was submitted a while ago, but hasn't picked up much discussion in the past. Resubmitting now in relation to the discussion on the 737-MAX8: Using software to stabilize hardware isn't easy. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19509618 ) More Mickens: https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens

Added in Watch later yesterday. Absolutely fun and knowledgeable. You might also check his home page[1], contains good and important stuff like this one. [1]. https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens