16 ms·
Farewell from Rusty Russell
- mattbillenstein 9y agoGetting a 502?
- shakna 9y agoGitHub mirror: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/ed875ea1fcc6c34ea232610c3041d0978e327bbe https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/ed875ea1fcc6c34ea23...
- dotancohen 9y ago> Getting a 502? Next time it's gonna be you! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ3Q2WAzW8Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ3Q2WAzW8Q
- amingilani 9y ago> I went to 1997 USENIX, my first conference. Could someone please explain this to those of us that were 5 years old in 1997?
- atsaloli 9y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USENIX_Annual_Technical_Conference https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USENIX_Annual_Technical_Conf...
- saagarjha 9y agoNon-mobile link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USENIX_Annual_Technical_Conference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USENIX_Annual_Technical_Confer...
- raverbashing 9y agoThe parent comment and an answer as a mobile link are making me feel old Kids these days don't know the annoyances^W joy of configuring X11 so that startx would work (just kidding, things work more reliably today and that's how it should be, but someone had to experiment with it first)
- wjh_ 9y ago> The parent comment and an answer as a mobile link are making me feel old If it helps, I didn't actually exist at the time
- krylon 9y agoThere was a certain kind of joy I felt when I had finally managed to get that beast to work. But as I grew older, I preferred things to "just work" more and more. Mandatory xkcd comic: https://www.xkcd.com/963/ https://www.xkcd.com/963/
- ajdlinux 9y agoDon't screw up your modelines lest you blow up your monitor! (I'm younger than the GGP poster here, but I was enough of a nerd in primary school that I got into Linux at about the time that distro installers' XFree86 autoconfigurators got you most of the way but still had to have a manual modeline configuration option in the advanced settings...)
- dfox 9y agoFor a long time I believed that the warning about blowing up monitors by using wrong video mode was nonsense, until I had blown one (12" mono CRT, 1024x768@60 caused quite loud bang)
- ema 9y agoHey not so fast, some of us who were 5 in '97 still managed to share in the "joy" of configuring X11. Gentoo and the endless learning opportunities it provides be blessed.
- nice_byte 9y ago
- pjf 9y agoIMHO, Rusty Russell is the guy who made Linux so popular choice for software firewalls. Thanks Rusty & all netfilter team!
- tejasmanohar 9y agoFor those who don't know, Rusty built iptables along with many of its underlying technologies and predecessors. Most devops/sysadmin people interact with his work directly, and all of us do indirectly. So long! Edit: It appears that Rusty now works at Blockstream and is focusing on the Bitcoin Lightning network.
- otoburb 9y agoRusty Russell is a fairly unique name, but for some reason I never connected the dots when seeing his name crop up on the bitcoin & lightning mailing lists. Thank you for the memory jog.
- tejasmanohar 9y agoWoah, me neither! That's awesome. I've read many of his Medium posts without connecting the two.
- weinzierl 9y agoauthor Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au> 2017-08-15 07:01:08 +0930 committer Jessica Yu <jeyu@kernel.org> 2018-01-15 20:44:08 +0100 That’s a long time between the time it was written and the time it was committed.
- johnflan 9y agoNice closing To my fellow maintainers: stay harsh on code and don't be afraid to say "No" or "Why?"; there really are more bad ideas than good ones, and complexity is such a bright candle for us hacker-moths. But be gentle, kind and forgiving of your peers: respect from people you respect is really the only reward that sticks[9].
- ksec 9y agoWhy is he leaving? Am I suppose to know this? Googled a few times and nothing useful came out.
- matte_black 9y agoRetirement I assume. It has been a long time.
- pwm 9y agoBitcoin.
- JepZ 9y agoHis code blog tells you a little more about what he is doing lately: https://medium.com/@rusty_lightning https://medium.com/@rusty_lightning
- RustyRussell 9y agoI started working on Bitcoin three years ago, and finally finished handing over my kernel responsibilities. Nothing dramatic I'm afraid!
- dredmorbius 9y agoWho was the "homeless-looking" guy? Alan Cox?
- taspeotis 9y agoBut one person disagreed with my approach so much and so continuously that I developed a dread of reading my mail every morning: eventually I wrote a filter to send their mail to a separate mbox, which I've still never read and don't intend to. Such a disappointing situation to see, and potentially so demotivating. Glad it didn’t halt his contributions.
- mschaef 9y agoAgree that it's disappointing... but I'm very glad to see that he came up with a good way to deal with it. /dev/null (or its rough equivalent) has its uses.
- kinleyd 9y agoWhat a nice sign off! I enjoyed reading every bit of it.
- tebugst 9y agosame here !!!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- lukego 9y agoWhat a guy!
- sidcool 9y agoOne of the unsung heroes of kernels. Good luck Rusty.
- antirez 9y agoI loved the work Rusty performed so much! He started to work actively at Linux firewalling about at the same time as I became a Linux user and sysadmin, like more than 20 years ago, and I used what he made regularly and always found his work to have a sane UI to the admin: simple to use yet quite powerful stuff. In general kernel hackers are really a bunch of unicorns that are very focused on the code they are writing and the problems to solve, and I've the feeling that while in the 90s they were deeply recognized for their work, now instead in some way their work is a bit in the shadow... with much hype going into places where it's not deserved. But apparently most of them want just to code at low level, don't be annoyed, and get a salary. The essence of the old times programmer basically. Impressed with: "disagreed with my approach so much and so continuously that I developed a dread of reading my mail every morning: eventually I wrote a filter to send their mail to a separate mbox". I'm very sorry to read this. In the early days of Redis this happened to me as well, there were a group of people continuously attacking me and I was horrified by the idea of reading their Twitter replies at some point. However instead of filtering them, I found (without conscious efforts, it just happened) a different solution, I became more and more sentimentally disconnected from the chats focusing solely on the actual arguments, filtering most of the tone and human-level parts. This makes me a sadder person, not able to joy or be sad for things I read on social networks for the most part, however in the pro side there is that I can read the harsh criticisms and find some value, sometimes, without being affected. Moreover, as a secondary adjustment, I no longer reply after a given point if I may start to sound attacking towards another person. This does not mean to accept everything, but just say after N replies: "we disagree but you are cool, I'll do what I think, have a nice day". I still believe that we can stay in the tech world, not accepting what other people say if we disagree from a technical standpoint, without being assholes.
- sbarre 9y agoI took away an interesting thought from the post and from your reply: You can be harsh to ideas, but be nice to people.
- antirez 9y agoExactly. Moreover programming is not building a bridge, so sometimes a lot of arguments have no final solution or truth, and are up to the personal tastes/vision. In that case, to debate till the end of the day is quite futile once it is clear that the two arguments cannot meet in any way. In that case, better to say "thanks for the exchange" before it becomes too harsh. There is no need to win arguments.
- def- 9y agoInteresting to read his qualms about the cryptocurrency field: https://medium.com/@rusty_lightning/the-corrosion-of-ethics-in-cryptocurrencies-f7ba77e9dfc3 https://medium.com/@rusty_lightning/the-corrosion-of-ethics-...
- nailer 9y ago> I listened in awe as this homeless-looking guy described porting Linux to the Ultrasparc, and then described how he then proceeded to beat Solaris on every single lmbench microbenchmark.[2] This was the same guy who, after writing a comprehensive detailed post about Solaris performance, was trolled by a Sun employee who was in charge of performance - with a post that consisted, in it's entirety, of > 'have you ever kissed a girl?' This kind of arrogance is what killed Sun (and Joyent).
- Maken 9y agoSo, do you happen to know who was that guy and have any link about his work? Now I'm really interested.
- Fnoord 9y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Cantrill https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Cantrill
- ajdlinux 9y agoThat would be David Miller, discussed extensively in the rest of Rusty's post.
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 9y agohttp://cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html http://cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html
- geirfreysson 9y ago"Actually, bitcoin is a nice reward too; it's like crystalized machine sweat!" Crystalized machine sweat - very good.
- ajdlinux 9y ago"I flew myself around Australia visiting every LUG to convince them to come to the first Australian Linux conference." The story of CALU 1999 being funded on Rusty's personal credit card is legendary in the Australian Linux community. Having recently attended my fourth linux.conf.au, as it's now known, I'm very grateful for Rusty's instrumental role in building the Linux and free software community here. (Also, I'm now lucky enough to work with the legendary group of hackers at OzLabs - the best graduate job that I could hope for in Canberra!)
- DINKDINK 9y agoRusty’s work is an amazing legacy. Very happy he’s working on developing Lightning Network on bitcoin for a few years now.
- bjt2n3904 9y ago> To my fellow maintainers: stay harsh on code and don't be afraid to say "No" or "Why?"; there really are more bad ideas than good ones, and complexity is such a bright candle for us hacker-moths. A breath of fresh air in the day and age of installing package managers to install another package manager to install an autoloader to load the plugin for the transpiler for the code we haven't started writing yet.[1] 1 - http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/05/10/a-moment-of-nostalgia/ http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/05/10/a-moment-of-nostalg...
- tebugst 9y agoWoow !!! Journey of 20 years. I get bored maintaining 1 year of code. Hats off to you Sir !!!
- mmcallister 9y agoI met Rusty at Linux Conference Australia 2017 (In Hobart) We were in the same dorm, and he borrowed some of my toothpaste.
- RustyRussell 9y agoI'll return it at Auckland next year, I promise!
- jschlst 9y agoThanks for all your linux work. Glad you are doing well. Dont become a comedian, as I never got your jokes. J