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What If Linus Torvalds Gets Hit by a Bus? (2000)
- Svip 8y agoMight want to add '(2000)' to the title. I feel like Torvalds himself have been addressing aspects of this issue this year.
- soneca 8y agoRead the text, it is not what you think
- Svip 8y agoI did read the text. It's humorous. But the question itself is no less important. And considering what happened with Torvalds' position this year, one might think it is a follow up to that question. So I think adding '(2000)' would definitely be helpful, if not just accurate.
- porphyrogene 8y ago> what happened with Torvalds' position this year Read: He went on vacation for five weeks.
- TimTheTinker 8y agoOP means appending ` (2000)` to the title as a year-published annotation, to disambiguate from current events. This is commonly done on HN.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- rlopezcc 8y agoIt also names Miguel de Icaza as a similarly important character, it was in 2000 because gnome, event considering Mono as an important technology nowadays, it's not as significative or critical as Gnome was back then. Edit: wording.
- dang 8y agoAdded now. Thanks!
- an-allen 8y agoReal Story Here. A colleague and I developed a training course on the Foundations of DevOps. We started the course off with a discussion about risk in Software Delivery and IT in general. Attendees would often surface the "Key-Person Risk" or the "Hit by a Bus Risk" to which we would use as a teachable moment for pair programming, cross pollination, and measuring and improving the time it takes for new joins to become productive with the systems and or code base. We would illustrate that one of the ways we mitigated the Key Person Risk with the course was to always deliver it in pairs. My colleague was tragically struck by a car and killed about three months ago. The course suffered an immense blow to the knowledge capital it had - but due to the fact that we had planned to mitigate against key-person risk by pairing - the course was able to survive and retain a fair bit of the legacy my colleague left behind. I just share this to say that the getting "hit by a bus" scenario is something that, much like this post, we throw around in jest and treat in a laissez-faire fashion. The fact is that it is a tragic, unimaginable, event that does in fact occur from time to time and something I will take seriously for the rest of my life.
- geofft 8y agoI'm very sorry for your loss. I've heard "wins the lottery" as a less morbid metaphor for the same concept: one of your employees stops working in a low-probability event. Of course the higher-probability event is leaving their job (but somehow it's less polite to just say that); you usually get two weeks to hurriedly start documenting things, and with the current state of employee/employer relations you might easily get less. Or they might have several days of vacation saved up.
- matte_black 8y agoI don’t like when people use “wins the lottery” because it leads to distracting tangents. A person that wins a lottery could do anything. How much did they win? Maybe they’ll still keep working? Maybe they’ll go off to start their own company and take a bunch of key employees with them? Maybe they’ll be broke in a year and come back to their job? Maybe they don’t leave right away? These are just distractions you don’t need when illustrating a point. By contrast, a person being struck by a bus and killed has a definite finality to it. There is no going back. There is no hope of extracting knowledge from the once living individual. There is not even time to prepare. Their existence and their output has ceased and everyone alive must now live in this new reality.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- hirundo 8y ago> Our sample consisted of 200 Linus Torvaldses If there were 200 Linus Torvaldses then after one gets hit by a bus there would be 199 left. Even after the experiment there were at least 108.9 remaining. That should be plenty to keep Linux going. So what's the problem?
- guide42 8y agoThey all die of age around the same time.
- adtac 8y agoUnfortunately, they all exist in parallel. So unless we figure out how to cryogenically freeze humans for hundreds of years, we'll run out of Torvaldii (which I think should be the plural for Torvalds) very soon.
- schoen 8y agoTorvalds is a Swedish name (Linus Torvalds is from a Swedish Finn family) and it seems to originate as the genitive (possessive) of the name Torvald https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Torvald https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Torvald I think this use of the genitive is a form of patronymic, like if someone named Torvald had a son named Einar, maybe that person could be called "Einar Torvalds" (that is, Torvald's Einar). So it should probably have a Swedish plural https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_grammar#Plural_forms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_grammar#Plural_forms I'm not sure which declension it should belong to as a name (and I'll ask a friend to speculate), but the possibilities there seem to be Torvaldsor, Torvaldser, and Torvaldsar. There are no Latin plurals in -i when the nominative form doesn't end in -us or -um. If you make a Latin plural of Torvalds, it would probably be third declension and something like Torvaldes (compare urbs 'city', urbes 'cities'), unless the consonants change in the oblique cases.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mcguire 8y ago
- JohnJamesRambo 8y agoThe early web was a pretty cringey place, although it is now too.
- znpy 8y agoI think that it was more humorous and funny.
- pvaldes 8y agoMh, Good question. To avoid an unnecessary waste of fine finnish blood (Santa Claus could get angry with me) I will try with a cute animal first cat > /dev/bus It seems safe enough... the kitty cat is alive
- krapp 8y agoOk. But what if Richard Stallman gets hit by a falling piano?
- TomK32 8y agoBeer-shortage in Redmond?
- rightbyte 8y agoBeer surplus, I would say.
- ThrowawayB7 8y agoI doubt anyone in Redmond would really have cared all that much. We were building products to sell and FOSS was* just another competitor. * And, despite Nadella, it still is.
- pvaldes 8y agoWe would still have the other Stallmans from the Stall-verse
- MikusR 8y agoEmacs would get new features and improvements.
- zunzun 8y agoThe methodology seems flawed in that it does not take into account that, if the buses were self-driving, what operating system was used as this would affect collision lethality.
- TomK32 8y agoI got hit by a bus two years ago, granted it was more of a rude push by the side of the bus that I was riding for 6 hours from Athens to its last stop Preveza and the bus driver was just about to park his bus, but getting hit by a bus is not necessary lethal. I simply got back on my feet and dusted my pants.
- danso 8y agoI don’t think the posted article is referring to non-lethal bus collisions.
- roywiggins 8y agoGuess it depends on what kind of non-lethal. There's lots of ways to be functionally knocked out of commission for a long time.
- gammateam 8y agoActually it factors that in too
- based2 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_continuity_planning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_continuity_planning https://www.cmmiconsultantblog.com/cmmi-faqs/what-is-service-continuity-scon-in-context-of-cmmi-for-services/ https://www.cmmiconsultantblog.com/cmmi-faqs/what-is-service... https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ab601z/what_if_linus_torvalds_gets_hit_by_a_bus/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ab601z/what_if... https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/driver-model/bus.txt https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/...
- EGreg 8y agoWhy is it always a bus?
- znpy 8y agoBuses are evil tools of the proprietary software corporations, this has been widely known for a while now.
- znpy 8y agoI am bothered by the fact that Linus is made plural as "Linus Torvaldses" and not "Lini Torvalds".
- aasasd 8y agoI'm pretty sure he's not a Roman but a Finn. (I'm also quite sure most languages today aren't Latin, namely English isn't. But what do I know, English speakers seem to have a different opinion.)
- JorgeGT 8y agoFinland is the heir of the Roman Empire though: https://i.imgur.com/eNuUdTd.png https://i.imgur.com/eNuUdTd.png
- aasasd 8y agoI'm having a hard time deciding what's more far-fetched, between this and the actual areas of spread of Finno-Ugric languages.
- DFHippie 8y agoEnglish is pretty casual about borrowing other languages' plural forms, and Latin second declension nominatives -- alumnus/alumni, millenium/millenia -- are probably the most familiar non-English singular/plural pairs to English speakers. To an English speaker, Prii seems like a reasonable plural for Prius (though if it's a Latin word, it looks like a neuter comparative, in which case the plural is "priora"). Similarly, "Lini" looks like the plural of "Linus". It's an interesting philosophical question: given that English speakers are familiar with this Latin pattern, can apply it spontaneously to new words, and perhaps are even unaware that it comes from Latin, has this become a backwater grammatical rule of English? We're willing to say originally French words like apartment and address are English. How about Lini as the plural of Linus?
- aasasd 8y agoAfaik it's only with Latin that English-speakers insist on universal adoption of the foreign plural. For other words the irregularity is a rare exception―while for Latin it's pretty much regularity instead. For some reason, people don't seem so keen on using French plural forms for French words: e.g. "animaux" and "journaux." Same with German ones, Italian, Yiddish or Arabic. Probably because borrowed words are mangled to the rules of the adopting language, like it's done everywhere. IMO not only using Latin plurals in English doesn't make sense and is rather arbitrary, but it's kept around by people insisting on correcting others contrary to those others' intuition. It's time to stop.
- dikaio 8y agoThe articles on HN are great but the comments are we keep me coming back, hilarious. Have to run, need to catch my bus.
- winrid 8y agoHalf the time I just read the comments. I think I'm addicted. :)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- giekaton 8y ago"What If Linus Torvalds Gets Hit by a Bus?” is now permanently archived on: https://setinblock.com/0x8006d703a45663cab96a85a4ef3e6ab94a1410d6e70119139eea807a63ecb79e https://setinblock.com/0x8006d703a45663cab96a85a4ef3e6ab94a1...
- JeremyBanks 8y agoDo you have a license to permanently redistribute it?
- giekaton 8y agoThat's not a traditional form of re-distribution. In legal terms, I guess it's a gray area. The article is now on the blockchain. It is not published (re-distributed) anywhere in particular. It's also encoded and not in the actual form of an article.
- JeremyBanks 8y agoInvolving a technically convoluted mechanism doesn't change the fundamental legal question here. It's just made it harder for you to undo your potential violation. A temporary web mirror has at least a narrow time scope and a justification. Choosing to embed a copy of content you don't own into a permanently-public record is a greater offense.
- giekaton 8y agoI wonder where exactly do you see the violation? Is it that I archived it on the blockchain, or that I shared a reader link to that transaction where the article is archived?
- thecatspaw 8y ago> Crummy is © 1996-2018 Leonard Richardson. Unless otherwise noted, all text licensed under a Creative Commons License. You're fine. I would not recommend doing this with texts which you dont have the copyright to.
- techpop10 8y agoAnswer: Someone will have to clean the bus.
- sbr464 8y agoI'm curious how startups or venture capitalists handle risk around DevOps, especially certificates, encryption keys, access to dns/domain names etc. Legal processes take time, you typically need this info quickly in production. I'm not a VC, but if I was, I would want a backup plan in place before handing over an XX Million $ check. A smaller startup, or a seed level/pre-launch team may only have 1 or 2 founders with "admin" level access to this info. I always thought a "Swiss bank account" type service for DevOps would be useful. It could handle this situation in a modern way (with a secure, modern API etc) and would execute a certain disaster recovery plan reliably. Obviously centralizing that kind of data/ would be a security nightmare in itself. I'm curious how a larger VC with many companies deals with this consistently. I know there are services available in different areas that specialize in handling certain data (corporate branding/identity, domain names etc) but not as a whole.
- pm90 8y ago> Swiss bank account" type service for DevOps What does this mean? That nobody has access to production systems except devops?
- sbr464 8y agoFor example, there is a copy of the most core encryption keys, certificates/passwords etc, stored with a 3rd party, who is specialized in dealing with this kind of info in a modern way. Similar to how a Swiss bank is familiar with storing valuables/currency or executing a will. This type of service would need to be modern in the sense the info can be updated over an API etc. Anyone can create a DR plan and handle these issues, but then it isn't consistent, especially from a partner (VC etc) perspective.
- pm90 8y agoI want to ask a genuine question to folks here about disaster recovery and management. It sounds pretty horrible, but at what point do you just throw up your hands and give up? How many people in your company would need to be hit by a bus? Or maybe if aws went down completely for a week? I guess I'm wondering: how far into the rabbit hole must we go? I guess the changes of a coworker passing away are more than aws going down for a week. I guess I'm just overwhelmed by how many scenarios we need to plan for.
- cdoxsey 8y agoThis happened to some financial companies on 9/11: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor_Fitzgerald#9/11_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor_Fitzgerald#9/11_attacks
- TagAsDelusion 8y agolinus IS linux
- mhh__ 8y agoOn a much smaller scale, I realized that I am probably the only person in my group (of stage/ audiovisual technical folks) who understands everything fully: I'm stopping next year, so I'm documenting how to do everything I do. You can never have too much documentation - which isn't exactly what this dilemma is about - but still it raises an interesting bit of planning which should always be considered.
- koonsolo 8y agoBefore I left my first job, I made a document called "Koen's brain dump" where I would document anything that only I knew. Years later I heard from my ex-colleagues that they not only used my brain dump, but were still extending it. Seems like I was getting smarter without me ever realizing it ;).
- teacpde 8y agoThe question in the article reminds me what I read yesterday about an interview with Bram Moolenaar (author of Vim): > How can the community ensure that the Vim project succeeds for the foreseeable future? > Keep me alive. https://www.binpress.com/vim-creator-bram-moolenaar-interview/ https://www.binpress.com/vim-creator-bram-moolenaar-intervie...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- penpop15 8y agoVery much appalled at the poor attention to detail taken in the documentation of this experiment. How will I ever know by which type of muffin Linus' life was threatened?
- scarface74 8y agoWhat’s crazy is that I voluntarily try to set aside time to document and cross train but I get push back. I don’t think anyone has ever voluntarily left the small company I work for and they don’t think about what would happen if I leave. I try to cross train for a few reasons - I would never want to leave the company in a lurch if I find a better opportunity, I don’t want to be stuck on an implementation forever because I’m the only one that knows how to do it, and after awhile, I forget how the systems I designed works together.
- majui 8y agoIf Linus Torvalds was hit by a bus, the bus would be a bit damaged but fine after some repairs.
- dang 8y agoCould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? We're trying to do a bit better than internet default here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- davidscolgan 8y agoSpeaking of getting hit by a bus, a friend and I are considering a consulting service that could help mitigate bus factor risk - would love any feedback on this idea. We've both noticed that for nontechnical owners of small businesses that have a heavy software component, that owner is completely at the mercy of their lead developer. If that person leaves or "gets hit by a bus" their company might just die, especially since they don't really know what a Github is or how to log into anything. My friend is such a nontechnical person and hired someone to build his SaaS app. He has felt this risk himself but we wonder if he's just particularly perceptive. The service would be, for a retainer fee per month a developer sits in on your planning calls, looks over all code committed to your repo, and over time documents how everything works and stores that documentation in a system outside of the company (maybe an external wiki or something). Then if your lead developer leaves, we'd help you find a new one and then train them on the codebase using the documentation created.
- schoen 8y agoOver on the Let's Encrypt Community Forum we get quite a few inquiries from people who say "I'm the site owner and my developer [disappeared|quit|was only hired for a one-time setup task] and my certificate expired; how do I renew it?". I assume this is a really common pattern for web sites in general. :-( I don't imagine that this segment would be interested in paying for "continuity insurance", but they might grudgingly hire someone for "tech rescue". I guess that's a very different kind of service; I'm not sure if there's anything in between the two.
- jimnotgym 8y ago> I don't imagine that this segment would be interested in paying for "continuity insurance", but they might grudgingly hire someone for "tech rescue". I guess that's a very different kind of service; I'm not sure if there's anything in between the two. Very sadly I find myself agreeing with your assessment in general. However I was once seeking almost exactly this service, and I have to say I struggled to find what I wanted.
- lucb1e 8y ago
- oferzelig 8y agoWhat about Antirez? I guess no one knew him back in 2000...
- tomkat0789 8y agoThere's a lot of comments considering the general case of losing a key person on a project, but I think it'd be interesting to speculate on what happens to Linux when Linus leaves the project! Will it go embrace, extend, exterminate? Will there be a bunch of forks? Will Redhat/IBM/Canonical types keep it up?
- gabrielblack 8y agoObvious, he sends SIGBUS to the driver and then someone examines the core dump :-) Forgive me !