4 ms·

This article is a bit strange and conflates disk storage with swap and RAM. Modern systems don't necessarily even have swap (looking at you, k8s), so the whole

This article is a bit strange and conflates disk storage with swap and RAM. Modern systems don't necessarily even have swap (looking at you, k8s), so the whole article falls on its face. > And then there were the secondary store, paper tape, magnetic tape, disk drives the size of houses, then the size of washing machines and these days so small that girls get disappointed if think they got hold of something else than the MP3 player you had in your pocket. This is also written terribly.

slver 5y ago
> This is also written terribly. I rewrote it for clarity: > Storage was large. Today it's small. Smaller than a dick.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- weeboid 5y ago
  Yeah, that is a really bad take. Remind me again why women drop out of engineering teams. To frame this triggering statement, imagine if he had somehow used breasts to make the same analogy. He’d be in a heap of trouble, prob LIFO’d out of his job
  - slver 5y ago
    Wait a minute, so... 1. If he makes a dick joke, women drop out of engineering teams. 2. If he makes a breasts joke, women drop out of engineering teams. So basically women in general prefer that human parts not be mentioned in jokes, but men like human parts. Interesting. I'm taking notes.
    - jmull 5y ago
      Nah. The point is, don't make your argument in obnoxious, off-putting, offensive terms.
      - Supermancho 5y ago
        What was offensive about it?
        jmull 5y ago
        The challenge is to be able to understand how a particular post would appear to various other people who are unlike yourself. So I think you should answer that question yourself. Expend some effort or imagination, or else there’s no point.
        Supermancho 5y ago
        Your comments aren't offensive, but they seem like externalizing your own issues. Asking someone to consider what's offensive isn't constructive, when you aren't able to describe what you think is offensive and why.
        slver 5y ago
        I just imagined what if we have to consider other civilizations for our posts and what they might be offended by. For example, the civilization of Dune is offended by any mention of complex "thinking machines", so any programming topic to them would be like an article full of dick jokes. Imagine we get visited by aliens, but no matter what we do, they get gravely offended, and we can't understand why.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        weeboid 5y ago
        Thank you, but there’s hardly any point in arguing with a rock. You might be making great points, but at the end of the day, observers see a man talking to a rock. The rock may roll at some point, through forces beyond yourself
- dang 5y ago
  "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
indymike 5y ago
> This article is a bit strange and conflates disk storage with swap and RAM. The author is pointing out that many programs duplicate OS virtual memory functionality by paging temporary data to persistent storage and loading it when needed. This duplicates the operating system's built in virtual memory capability and has negative effects on the system. The whole idea of virtual memory is to allow a system to handle loads where memory allocated exceeds the size of RAM. > Modern systems don't necessarily even have swap (looking at you, k8s) Modern linux does have swap, and it is quite useful. Proper support for swap is coming in k8s (looks like 1.23). Quite a few workloads need swap to run safely, so adding this to k8s will be an improvement. > This is also written terribly. Bad joke was bad.
- daveslash 5y ago
  It would have been funny if I was still 15. But then again, this article is from 2006; The blogosphere was a different place in those days, and I've matured since then as well - hopefully the author has too. Still: Bad joke was bad.
- mondoshawan 5y ago
  >> Modern systems don't necessarily even have swap (looking at you, k8s) > Modern linux does have swap, and it is quite useful. Proper support for swap is coming in k8s (looks like 1.23). Quite a few workloads need swap to run safely, so adding this to k8s will be an improvement. Ah, I see the HN pedants have arrived. I was not claiming that Modern Linux does not have swap. Note the words "don't necessarily". I was claiming not all machines have swap. Most of mine do not have it enabled, and I take effort to ensure on machines with 16GB or more RAM that it is disabled. I do run a K8S cluster as well, and those machines do not have swap enabled, not because K8S requires it to be off, but because having it on would be adverse to the health of the flash storage they use. TBH, this is the kind of vapid pedantic response I've come to expect of the average of HN comments these days, and why I'm considering just not using it anymore at this point.

slver 5y ago

> This is also written terribly. I rewrote it for clarity: > Storage was large. Today it's small. Smaller than a dick.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
weeboid 5y ago
Yeah, that is a really bad take. Remind me again why women drop out of engineering teams. To frame this triggering statement, imagine if he had somehow used breasts to make the same analogy. He’d be in a heap of trouble, prob LIFO’d out of his job
- slver 5y ago
  Wait a minute, so... 1. If he makes a dick joke, women drop out of engineering teams. 2. If he makes a breasts joke, women drop out of engineering teams. So basically women in general prefer that human parts not be mentioned in jokes, but men like human parts. Interesting. I'm taking notes.
  - jmull 5y ago
    Nah. The point is, don't make your argument in obnoxious, off-putting, offensive terms.
    - Supermancho 5y ago
      What was offensive about it?
      - jmull 5y ago
        The challenge is to be able to understand how a particular post would appear to various other people who are unlike yourself. So I think you should answer that question yourself. Expend some effort or imagination, or else there’s no point.
        Supermancho 5y ago
        Your comments aren't offensive, but they seem like externalizing your own issues. Asking someone to consider what's offensive isn't constructive, when you aren't able to describe what you think is offensive and why.
        slver 5y ago
        I just imagined what if we have to consider other civilizations for our posts and what they might be offended by. For example, the civilization of Dune is offended by any mention of complex "thinking machines", so any programming topic to them would be like an article full of dick jokes. Imagine we get visited by aliens, but no matter what we do, they get gravely offended, and we can't understand why.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        weeboid 5y ago
        Thank you, but there’s hardly any point in arguing with a rock. You might be making great points, but at the end of the day, observers see a man talking to a rock. The rock may roll at some point, through forces beyond yourself
dang 5y ago
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

indymike 5y ago

> This article is a bit strange and conflates disk storage with swap and RAM. The author is pointing out that many programs duplicate OS virtual memory functionality by paging temporary data to persistent storage and loading it when needed. This duplicates the operating system's built in virtual memory capability and has negative effects on the system. The whole idea of virtual memory is to allow a system to handle loads where memory allocated exceeds the size of RAM. > Modern systems don't necessarily even have swap (looking at you, k8s) Modern linux does have swap, and it is quite useful. Proper support for swap is coming in k8s (looks like 1.23). Quite a few workloads need swap to run safely, so adding this to k8s will be an improvement. > This is also written terribly. Bad joke was bad.

daveslash 5y ago
It would have been funny if I was still 15. But then again, this article is from 2006; The blogosphere was a different place in those days, and I've matured since then as well - hopefully the author has too. Still: Bad joke was bad.
mondoshawan 5y ago
>> Modern systems don't necessarily even have swap (looking at you, k8s) > Modern linux does have swap, and it is quite useful. Proper support for swap is coming in k8s (looks like 1.23). Quite a few workloads need swap to run safely, so adding this to k8s will be an improvement. Ah, I see the HN pedants have arrived. I was not claiming that Modern Linux does not have swap. Note the words "don't necessarily". I was claiming not all machines have swap. Most of mine do not have it enabled, and I take effort to ensure on machines with 16GB or more RAM that it is disabled. I do run a K8S cluster as well, and those machines do not have swap enabled, not because K8S requires it to be off, but because having it on would be adverse to the health of the flash storage they use. TBH, this is the kind of vapid pedantic response I've come to expect of the average of HN comments these days, and why I'm considering just not using it anymore at this point.