I find these kind of posts profoundly uninteresting (woah, the n-th parody of the HN front page...) and yet they seem to always garner so many upvotes...
These two follow-ups are pretty good follow-ups actually—they're fun variations on the theme—but I don't think they clear the bar for another major frontpage thread:
All non-trivial specs, like the one for seL4, are hard to verify. Lots of that complexity comes from interacting with the rest of the world which is a huge shared mutable global state you can't afford to ignore.
Of course, you can declare that the world itself is inherently sinful and imperfect, and is not ready for your beautiful theories but seriously.
OpenSSH is from the people at OpenBSD, which means performance improvements have to be carefully vetted against bugs, and, judging by the fact that they're still on fastfs and the lack of TRIM in 2025, that will not happen.
There's nothing inherently slow about UFS2; the theoretical performance profile should be nearly identical to Ext4. For basic filesystem operations UFS2 and Ext4 will often be faster than more modern filesystems.
OpenBSD's filesystem operations are slow not because of UFS2, but because they simply haven't been optimized up-and-down the stack the way Ext4 has been Linux or UFS2 on FreeBSD. And of course, OpenBSD's implementation doesn't have a journal (both UFS and Ext had journaling bolted late in life) so filesystem checks (triggered on an unclean shutdown or after N boots) can take a long time, which often cause people to think their system has frozen or didn't come up. That user interface problem notwithstanding, UFS2 is extremely robust. OpenBSD is very conservative about optimizations, especially when they increase code complexity, and particularly for subsystems where the project doesn't have time available to give it the necessary attention.
I think the problem is IPS-provided routers being locked down. Alternatively, IPv6 availability and support. Alternatively, static residential IPv4 availability. Alternatively, dynamic dns services which always require a subscription to use your own domains.
I mean, fission is already a miracle. If you described the tech to the people in the 1800s and told them we just keep using fossile fuels they would laugh at you
> [...] we have three options for these kinds of words: “cooperate,” “co-operate,” and “coöperate.” Back when the magazine was just getting started, someone decided that the first misread and the second was ridiculous, and adopted the diaeresis as the most elegant solution with the broadest application.
Foreign property ownership is not like buying an Armani bag when you visit Italy. The financial regulations are complementary to the legal ones. Besides, even if you just sent 2 bitcoins, what about all the remaining documentation? It's not gonna fill out itself
And this is [part of] why Dubai has the highest per capita influx of high net worth individuals.
You can call them a dystopic theocracy, which is a bit true, but you can literally just fly over and buy a condo in a neighborhood with basically zero violent crime, with 2 bitcoins with essentially no questions asked.
RMS to me is really a curious case. He doesn't know how to install GNU+Linux and relies on others to do it. He doesn't know how to take a screenshot, and I remember reading other snippets from him about not knowing how to perform other basic tasks.
I once asked a YC alum, "Got any good Paul Graham stories?" And he had a couple; apparently the dude would often ask for help with basic tech things like setting up his wireless. Same kind of thing, I guess.
TBH with everchaning ifconfig/ip/systemd under GNU/Linux you almost forget that over years when your focused on Lisp or similar.
Under OpenBSD as the settngs are pretty much the same over releases, you can use ifconfig and /etc/hostname.if almost forever. That's it, upgrade and forget.
The more 'h4ck3r' screenshot you have with useless toys at /r/unixporn in Reddit, the less you actually know about computers.
Most i3 setups there are for showoff; cwm has better defaults and conmuting between
tags it's far more manageable than fighting with tiles where often the window resolutions are either useless or scramble your content.
Also most fluxbox or *box users will have far better setups than i3 ones because they use their actual setups to do actual stuff instead of posting screenshots.
Hard disagree. The fact that they have customized their system to such a degree shows they do know how to use computers. I think you're trying to conflate that with other things like programming ability, which are orthogonal.
Wrong. Knowing to customize a theme != knowing to use a computer != knowing how computers work.
I can say I know computers and how they work pretty well, but these days I have much better things to do to learn the best way to themes my shell so that it matches my waybar, and that both switch colourscheme when dark mode activates. I could learn if I wanted, but I’m not a teenager anymore; I don’t care. Incidentally, when I had the time concern myself with GTK themes and wallpapers and Compiz, my knowledge in computers was a tenth of what it is now.
It would be like saying a car decorator is the most expert of mechanics.
This. Nowadays I just use Zukitre for GTK/Qt and the Tango icon theme, it suits
TWM/CWM and any other minimal WM without tons of effort. A dull gray theme combines with everything, even with my Cyan titlebars for TWM (they make a great contrast with red borders and wheat yellow icons/menus). You know, I want to use my computers and the titlebars stand out like crazy. And, actually, I've just borrowed an old color config used from a university.
The background?
xsetroot -solid gray20
I never understood the trend on dark/bright modes; the gray themes from my childhood/early teens with W98SE (and used by Mac OS 7/8 too) are just neutral and barely 'sit there'.
I love nature pictures, so I collected a few from all seasons, and now all my customization is every 3 months to change which season’s wallpapers to rotate from.
They are just old school. When you learn coding before GUIs were mainstream, you don't care that much about exciting UIs.
Heck, Kernighan was one of the original developers of Unix. In 2015 he was already coding for more than 40-50 years, more time than most from Hacker News are alive. The only constant from that time is the terminal, so no wonder most people in the post gravitate towards that
Coincidence? No, these are people for whom the computer is a tool. My smartest and most productive colleague run stock KDE and a more or less unconfigured Vim. He truly does not give a shit.
You might be onto something, because interestingly I don't think there's any software at all I know inside out or have ever mastered.
I've used everything from DAWs, image editors, IDEs, terminal emulators, operating systems, dev tools, spreadsheets and I'm quite sure I've never went much in depth in any of them.
I'm not like that on the abstract level.
I know the ins and outs of functional programming concepts and their mathematical definitions, many deep details of programming languages or their compilers and many other things but I suck at tooling.
It's not just IT-related.
I can explain thoroughly the chemistry of dough making (which is far from simple), but I never got very good at making it, so friends of mine that know nothing about how it works still make better bread or pizza than I do.
I don't know why people take him so seriously. He said some decent things about software freedom, and the rest of his entire existence seems to be him being deliberately obtuse and generally off-putting. I find it bizarre that there's this strange carve-out here for him, especially considering that he would absolutely loathe 99% of the software that gets discussed here.
RMS is an extremist, and not the kind of person I tend to agree with, he seems to be a bit of an asshole too...
But that's also the kind of people we need. Companies are not going to compromise on their profits, we need someone to balance that and not compromise on software freedom. With these two extremes we can take an balanced position and that's how we got Linux and distros like Debian: it is free software, but it is also pragmatic. If we only had pure GNU (HURD), we wouldn't get far, but if we didn't have GNU at all, it would be even worse.
Richard Stallman didn't just talk. He actually wrote code, famously Emacs, and started the whole GNU project. I am not aware of recent technical contributions though.
I lived a year in a great hostel run by a German girl in Mexico.
She was always planning social events, hyping the place so that it was full of interesting people, and more. It was the most social part of my life even though I was 30.
But she also was frantic and obsessive and short tempered which was off putting.
Other guests would often complain about her, and they would phrase it as if she’d be cool if only she could turn down that one aspect about her. I had the same reaction at first too.
But eventually it became painfully obvious to me that that’s not how people work. Because the quirk you’re complaining about is the same quirk that got her to start a successful hostel across the world that we’re all enjoying.
We aren’t a bunch of independent levers that we get to adjust. Yet for some reason we pretend like that’s the case.
> We aren’t a bunch of independent levers that we get to adjust. Yet for some reason we pretend like that’s the case.
I've noticed this too, and my pet theory is that it's yet another toxic side effect of pervasive consumerism. We get so used to being able to find that one product whose feature list is exactly what we want, that we end up carrying that same micro-managing expectation into other areas of life. We've lost the ability to appreciate things holistically.
> But she also was frantic and obsessive and short tempered which was off putting.
My audio subsystem behaves exactly the same way!
Sometimes I'll send it a simple email politely asking to grab the block of samples it just sent to the soundcard and replace them with different samples that I've included as an attachment. It always makes this rude clicking noise at me which I do not appreciate at all.
I guess it's too much to ask to just take a little time to fashion a polite response while also hitting soft realtime deadlines. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is very well put. I appreciate him because I can't or rather I won't be like him. We need people like him and I will be the first to say "not it".
I think that sort of goes hand-in-hand. "Normal", well-rounded people don't decide that software licensing is the most important thing in the world and don't devote their entire life to that. A normal person would be content with a 9-to-5 software engineering job at Sun, IBM, or Microsoft.
I think you see that with a lot of other revolutionaries. They often take unreasonable positions and behave in unreasonable ways. RMS' tragedy is probably that his side more or less won, so now he's just a weirdo without a cause.
This puts me in mind of the words of George Bernard Shaw:
‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.'
And the world, people as a mob, will try its best to punish that person for daring to be different. The nail that sticks out gets beaten.
RMS is a flawed person, a stubborn unreasonable man with questionable traits. But dismissing his life's work as "said some decent things" is just ignorant revisionist history. We can acknowledge his flaws while respecting the work he did and the overall message, which changed the world for the better.
This couldn't be further from the truth. He has given several talks where he's projecting his computer, you can see him comfortably switching between all the programs he uses (Emacs, Mathematica, etc); in fact he is very efficient and has them customized just the way he wants it. (I even recall some blog post where the author watched one of these talks and was amazed by just wizardly he was navigating between programs or Emacs buffers or whatever.)
If you scroll down to the bottom of https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html you can see his configurations for Emacs and fvwm and even macOS keyboard layouts; some of them were updated as recently as this year.
> I designed my own bitmap font for use with Emacs, because I hate the way the ASCII apostrophe and the left open quote […] I prefer rxvt to xterm for terminal input. Since last December, I’ve been using a file backup system called backupfs, which meets my need beautifully […] Incidentally, with Linux I much prefer the keyboard focus that I can get with classic FVWM to the GNOME and KDE environments that other people seem to like better. To each their own.
Can you cite this in some way? Given he's shown the competence to write and typeset an impressive series of books, I find this claim pretty hard to believe.
Here is his fvwm rc. Given that it's fully documented, I will walk back my assumption that he can barely open a terminal. I researched it a bit and recalled an interview where he said something like "all I use X windows for is is to open a terminal in FVWM", so he clearly can customize it, but he prefers a minimalist setup.
FVWM setups can be really complex. Ditto with (c)twm. Once you are free to choose your windows geometry and keybindings, everything it's just either bloat or severely restricted.
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